Ghost
by Cheers
Summary: (Complete!) When a member of CSI goes missing, the rest of the team swings into action.
1. Chapter 1

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Allie for beta-reading. The flow and overall look of the story is due, in large part, to her input. As always, she is a class act.

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 1/26)

by Cheers

Friday Night, 9:12 PM

"What do ya mean Anaheim," Nick Stokes told Warrick Brown. "What about Bonds, man?" The two CSIs were sitting in a booth near the wide screen, actually an entire wall of smaller screens that formed a twenty foot high sports viewing experience currently carrying live coverage of game six of the World Series between the Anaheim Angels and the San Francisco Giants. The two younger men were conducting a friendly argument about the eventual winner of the currently contested series to the amusement of the other three men at the table: Gil Grissom, the two CSIs' supervisor, Jim Brass, a homicide detective who used to be their supervisor, and Doc Robbins, the Clark County Chief Medical Examiner.

"Bonds or no Bonds," Warrick told Nick. "Smart money is on Anaheim."

Interrupting the discussion, a waitress arrived at the table with five beers. "That'll be ten dollars, fellas," she said as she placed the bottles, each with an empty glass upturned on top, in the center of the table.

Grissom's brow furrowed as he did a bit of mental math. "Miss?" he said to the waitress. "I think you're shorting yourself." Everyone at the table looked at him. "Five beers, two fifty a piece, that should be twelve fifty."

"That's right," Nick agreed, nodding.

The waitress was smiling. Somehow she knew it would be this guy who figured out the charge was light. She liked the fact that he worried about her shorting the charge for the order. It made him that much more attractive. Not just cute but a real gentleman to boot. Bonus.

"The charge is for four beers, handsome," she said, setting the last beer down in front of him and leaning on one hand to get very close to Grissom's face, which provided him a very nice view of her ample frontal wares. Her voice was just a bit deeper than it had been and she looked directly into his blue eyes. "This one is on me."

She held his eyes until she was rewarded with Grissom's half-embarrassed and lopsided smile. She slowly rose and turned away, making sure to give him a good look at her other wares as she went. He watched her go with more than a little interest.

"Blam!" Nick said.

"You got that right," Warrick added.

"Must be the aftershave," Jim Brass muttered, surprised at his friend's good fortune and half-jealous as well.

Grissom hadn't yet turned his attention back to the company at the table. "I never wear it," he informed Brass. "It interferes with the job."

"Why does that not surprise me," Brass retorted, reaching for his beer.

"As good as," Doc Robbins said, reaching for one of the beers himself. This did bring Grissom's attention back to the table and the coroner in specific. Grissom raised his eyebrows.

"Oh?" Brass said to the good doctor.

Robbins worked at his beer and began to pour the golden liquid into his glass. He paused only when he realized everyone at the table was waiting for him to elaborate.

"Pheromones," he said, setting down the bottle. "Nature's aftershave." The doctor knew Grissom well enough to recognize that the slight grin on his face did little to cover the mild blanch of the blush in his neck. It had obviously never occurred to the forensic that he was an active participant in the human mating ritual just witnessed. Robbins was sure Grissom would deny it if the fact were pressed. That made this whole thing just that much more fun.

Warrick sat back and nodded with burgeoning understanding. "Pheromones," he repeated.

"Fariwhat?" Brass said, obviously bringing up the rear with the whole science gig. He usually enjoyed hanging with the guys, but when the other guys at the table were all on the nerd squad, he felt decidedly backward.

Doc Robbins was about to explain but was surprised when Grissom beat him to the punch.

"Pheromones are chemicals emitted by living organisms to send messages to individuals of the same species. The class most widely explored are the sex pheromones produced by female moths which are used to attract conspecific males for mating," Grissom told the detective. "Bombykol, the sex pheromone of the silkmoth, was first synthesized in 1959. Since then pheromones have been isolated for hundreds of species including, interestingly, humans."

"Spoken like a true entomologist," Robbins said before taking a deep drink of his beer.

"You know what they say," Nick said, smiling and pouring his own brew.

"What's that?" Brass asked, sure he would regret it.

Nick's smile broadened. "You can take the boy out of the lab but ..."

"... you can't take the nerd out of the boy," Brass finished catching the smile and nodding.

"Or the boy's pheromones," Warrick added. He was graced with a brief but scalding look from Grissom for his trouble.

Grissom looked back toward the bar and noticed that their waitress was looking at him and talking with the female bartender. They were probably enjoying his surprise at her forwardness. He held his beer up and nodded in thanks. His gesture was rewarded with a sensual smile. He smiled back. Why not? he thought. Life is short, and he really was enjoying the beer and the attention even if it meant living with the good natured ribbing from his co-workers. Some things were just worth the hassle factor.


	2. Chapter 2

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 2/26)

by Cheers

Sunday Night, 10:17 PM

Sara Sidle unlocked Gil Grissom's office door and pushed the door open. Flipping on the light, she entered. "Grissom?"

The room was empty. There were files occupying both in and out boxes, a few forms on the desk blotter, and an empty coffee cup with the dregs now dry in the bottom. Grissom had not been here in a few days. That in and of itself was odd. Even on his days off, Grissom could be counted on to at least check into his office to feed his menagerie and make sure nothing big was happening without him. Not much got by him anyway.

Turning on her heel, Sara headed out of the office and back to the break room. Catherine Willows entered right behind her.

Warrick looked up at the two entering CSIs and closed his cellphone. He and Nick had been trying to raise Grissom on the phone. "He's not answering yet. We've tried his cell AND his home phone at least five times. He's not there."

"Well," Catherine informed the group now in the room. "He's not in the morgue and he hasn't checked in there since Friday."

"Has Doc Robbins seen him?" Warrick asked.

"Not since your boys' night out," she told him. "Which, by the way, you were going to tell us about when?" Catherine gave Sara an informing glance at this last.

Warrick looked at Nick with a 'we're busted' expression and shrugged. "It's a guy thing," was all he said.

Nick held up the case slips from the reception desk, hoping to hopscotch over the guys'-night-out issue and get back to the boss. "We have three calls pending and Krista says she has over a dozen messages waiting for Gris. No one's seen him in a few days."

"His office is the same," Sara said. "No signs of life in there for a couple of days either."

"Yeah," Nick continued, "and he hasn't called in to get his messages. He hasn't answered his pager either. Krista said they actually had to page Eckley on Saturday because an issue with the Caldwell case couldn't wait."

"And Eckley didn't bother to tell any of us?" Warrick asked, his contempt for the day shift supervisor barely contained.

Sara was really worried now. "That doesn't sound right. It's not like Grissom to give a case the brush-off."

Catherine didn't like the sound of that either. "No, it isn't."

They all paused for a moment. The silence was a bit tense in its implication. Where the hell was Gil Grissom and why didn't any of them know?

Warrick was the first person to speak into the tentative silence. "You don't think..."

They all looked at him.

"What?" Catherine asked.

Warrick stared into the room without really looking at any of them. "Well, Gris once told me that he was a ghost in high school."

"Yeah, I remember that," Nick said. "So?"

Warrick gave a half shrug. "Remember the shift he assigned me as acting supervisor?"

Sara and Nick nodded meaningfully.

"When he got back he told me he did that to see if I could step in when he left CSI. He said that when he left there wouldn't be any cake in the break room. He'd just be gone, like a ghost."

Warrick fell silent again and could tell the wheels were whirring in the heads of the present company. He looked at Catherine and prayed that the expression on his face was open enough that she would know he wasn't try to step on her toes. Catherine was next in line for the job of night shift supervisor and everyone knew that. What Grissom was thinking when he had Warrick sub was anyone's guess. Warrick just wanted to be as accurate as possible. Under the circumstances, it seemed like the most appropriate way to relay information. Grissom was enough of an enigma as it was.

Sara had folded her arms and was scowling. "That's crap," she said. "Like he can just walk off and no one would notice or care?"

Nick felt the same way. "Grissom actually said that?"

Warrick nodded.

"That is so bogus." This last came from Greg Sanders who was standing at the door. He had quietly opened the door and listened to the conversation for several minutes undetected. Now everyone was looking at Greg. He sheepishly took another step into the room and let the door close behind him. Technically, he wasn't a CSI but he had been a part of the night shift team for long enough to want to be included. Grissom hadn't checked in the lab for two days now. That, in and of itself, was weird. The conversation in the break room only made that fact weirder.

Catherine opened her mouth to say something to the lab technician and instantly thought better of it. Greg Sanders had as much right to be there as any of the CSIs on the shift. She was the one who had told Gil that as the supervisor people would build a family around him whether he liked it or not. Who was she to say who got to be a member of the family?

"All right," Catherine said. "Let's do this the logical way."

"How's that?" Warrick replied.

"First things first," Catherine told them all. "Nick, what cases do we have tonight?"

Nick looked at the assignment slips. "There's a 411A, recovered vehicle on Blue Diamond Road, a 407, attempted robbery at the Citgo on Trop by the San Remo, and a 403, possible prowler, at the Avendale Apartments on Decatur."

Catherine nodded and thought for a moment. There wasn't anything there that would require them to double up. That was good. "Okay," she said, making some quick decisions. "Nick, you take the 411."

"Got it," Nick said.

"Warrick," Catherine continued, "take the 403."

"I'm on it."

Turning to Sara, Catherine said, "Sara, take the 407."

Sara took the assignment slip from Nick and looked at it. "I'm there. But..." Sara looked up at Catherine.

"I'm going over to Grissom's house. I'll call Brass and have him meet me there. If there's anything, I'll let you know." Catherine had said this to the whole company. She was as concerned as they were. Maybe more. Grissom just didn't disappear. He didn't just not come to work. He didn't just not check in. Not the Gil Grissom that she knew. Something wasn't right and Catherine sure as hell wanted to know what.

No one had moved. They all wanted to go with her and she knew it. "Look," she told them. "Until we know anything we do our jobs. The sooner everyone clears their plates the sooner we have the extra hands if we need them."

This made sense to everyone and they all began to move. Grissom would have done exactly the same. They would do their jobs until finding Grissom became their job. Until then, the city of Las Vegas demanded some attention.


	3. Chapter 3

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 3/26)

by Cheers

Sunday Night, 10:28 PM

Catherine rounded the corner in the main lobby of the Criminalistics building and found what she was looking for. All public buildings were required to have them. It had taken her several minutes to find instructions and then another few minutes looking through Gil's rolodex to find what she needed, and now she found the tool to put her gathered information to use.

The TDD station was a half-height booth nestled behind the main reception area of the lobby in their building. It consisted of a TTY machine on a small ledge in the booth.

Sitting down in front of the machine, Catherine placed the handset of the TTY in the acoustic coupler and turned on the power. She dialed in the phone number she had gotten from Gil's rolodex and waited. It took several seconds but her patience was rewarded as her screen lit up with the message she hoped she would receive.

Hello. This is Mrs. Grissom. GA

Catherine quickly began to type.

Hello, Mrs. Grissom. My name is Catherine Willows and I work with Gil in Las Vegas Criminalistics. GA

The TTY responded after a few seconds delay.

You have learned how to use a TTY. How lovely. I am pleased to hear from you but concerned. Is everything all right? GA

Catherine thought for a moment. Of course, she didn't want to upset Gil's mother, but if there was a chance Mrs. Grissom knew where Gil was the mystery of his disappearance could be cleared up quickly. This seemed the fastest way. If Mrs. Grissom were anything like Gil, and Catherine suspected that she must be (he had to get his nature from somewhere, after all) then she figured the direct route would be best.

Mrs. Grissom, when was the last time you heard from Gil? GA

She waited through another brief pause before:

Last Friday at 6:57 in the evening. My TTY saves time stamps so I can remember who called when. GA

Despite the purpose of her call, Catherine found herself smiling. Mrs. Grissom was as precise and informative as Gil would have been. She wasn't as surprised as she thought she'd be.

Did he say he was going anywhere this weekend? Do you know if he went out of town? GA Catherine asked.

There was a longer pause this time. Now, Catherine suspected, Mrs. Grissom was becoming worried. Catherine wondered just what she should tell Gil's mother. What would she want to hear if Lindsey were missing? She shook her head. This wasn't the same. Gil was a grown man with a very independent life and all their concerns, growing by the minute as they were, might just be a bit premature.

Ms. Willows, is something wrong? GA

"Damn," Catherine said out loud. The sound of her own voice startled her. She had been concentrating on the messaging and had forgotten they weren't speaking. She turned her attention back to the keyboard.

Mrs. Grissom, to be perfectly honest, I do not know. Gil did not come to work this evening and that is not like him. I thought that he might have had a meeting out of town that he forgot to tell anyone about or that he had gone to visit with you. Before getting too concerned I thought the logical thing to do would be to ask you. I hope I have not upset you. Do you know if he went out of town? GA

This time the wait was excruciating. It was probably only a few seconds but Catherine hated upsetting Mrs. Grissom and she knew that if Gil were all right he'd probably have a few choice words for her about it. But, dammit, what else was she supposed to do?

To answer your question, no, I do not know of any meeting or conference that Gil was supposed to go to. He is very good about telling me about his seminars and conferences. He usually sends me a postcard when he travels. I have received them from all over the world. I am sure that if Gil had to travel somewhere, he would have told me. GA

Catherine took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This call had been a long shot but a necessary step in what was rapidly becoming an official missing person's investigation.

Do you have access to the internet? GA

This question was answered more rapidly.

Yes, I do. GA

If you hear from Gil, will you contact me? My email address is GA

I will do it, Ms. Willows. Please tell me, are you afraid for Gil? Do you think something is wrong? GA

It was Catherine's turn to take a moment to respond. She decided that being as honest as possible was the best thing to do. Mrs. Grissom impressed her as being a no-nonsense sort of person. She was Gil's mother and she deserved to know the truth - as much of the truth as any of them knew at any rate.

Mrs. Grissom, I honestly do not know. I am concerned since it is unusual for Gil to be out of contact for so long. He is very conscientious. I promise you that we will do everything we can do to find out what the problem might be. It may be a simple miscommunication. I will contact you the moment I hear anything on this end. Is there a specific way you wish me to notify you? Email? GA

The wait for a reply was not long.

You can contact me here or online at Please do not forget. GA

You have my word, Mrs. Grissom. GA

Gil speaks very highly of you. I know I can trust you to do what you say. Thank you for letting me know. GA

Catherine sat back from the machine for a moment. She felt a little thunderstruck. It never occurred to her that Gil might have talked with his mother about her. The moment she thought that she realized how silly that must be. Of course Gil spoke to his mother about his work at CSI and about the people he worked with. His job, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be his life. Still, it gave Catherine pause to know that Gil said nice things about her to his mother. Lord knew he had reason enough, from time to time, to offer a not-so-glowing report of Catherine. She sat up and typed again.

You are welcome. I will contact you very soon. Good-bye. GA

Bye. GAtoSK

The phone light went out on the TTY and Catherine knew that Mrs. Grissom had hung up. Catherine turned the power off on the TTY and replaced the handset before rising.

She hadn't helped find out where Gil was at all, and she probably was causing some real undue concern for Mrs. Grissom. Way to go, Willows, she chided herself as she headed back to Gil's office and the phone on his desk.


	4. Chapter 4

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 4/26)

by Cheers

Sunday Night, 10:58 PM

He looked up. If he sat in just the right spot he could catch the barest glimpse of the night sky. One thing about the high desert, the view of the heavens was spectacular. The lights of downtown Las Vegas obscured this kind of view. How many times had he taken a moment when he was out of the city at night to just look up and wonder? That had been one of the perks of the job. He didn't always have to be in the office. Field work, real field work, afforded him the occasional unencumbered view of the night sky.

The sound of a soft rustling brought his attention swiftly away from the few stars he could see and back to his immediate surroundings. The rustling was close and he had to remind himself not to hold his breath. Make no sudden moves, he told himself, easy does it.

The rustling was quite muffled now and he didn't know if this was because his hearing was impaired at present or because the sound was growing more distant. He guessed it was the former.

"Probably another snake," Gil said out loud. His voice echoed softly. He had decided to use his voice to keep himself company. "Probably a common western," he continued. He was far too big for a snake to consider him prey so all he really needed to do was stay calm and not startle the reptile. The snake would find a cozy place to curl up for the night as the temperature continued to drop. The sounds of the snake's passage finally faded to such a degree that after several long moments of concerted effort Gil could no longer hear it.

He looked up again. This night sky was the third he had seen since being thrown down in the shaft. It must be late Sunday night. "I should be at work now," he told the night sky. He took a deep breath and winced at the jab of pain it elicited. The pain brought his head down again and Gil gripped his right side for support. His eighth or ninth rib had to be broken, perhaps both.

The renewed pain brought with it a reminder of another discomfort. Thirst. Gil could not remember when he felt so thirsty. He was hungry too. Don't go there, he chided himself silently.

"Think about the sky," he said softly. They were under the same sky. They were looking for him under the same stars.

Sunday Night, 10:59 PM

This Citgo was store number 243, the second of three Citgo stores on Tropicana Boulevard in the downtown area between Rainbow and Eastern. The afternoon clerk, a young man approximately twenty with questionable hygiene habits, was sitting on the top of two inverted and stacked milk crates and was in a state of nervous agitation, jogging one leg, chewing on the inside of one lip, and rubbing his palms on the thighs of his jeans. A uniformed police officer was taking his statement.

Sara made a cursory visual sweep of the counter and noted the popped cash register drawer with empty bill slots, an overturned Citgo coffee mug with dark liquid pooling at the opening, and very few other signs of disturbance. She looked up and saw that the security camera that monitored the counter was seated near the ceiling just above the office door. It hung loosely from a bracket and the wiring had been pulled from the back of the camera. The camera's power light was off.

Detective Corrie Pavin greeted Sara as she exited the office with the convenience store manager. "Hi, Sara."

"Hey."

"Sara Sidle, this is Mr. Singh, the manager," Pavin introduced a thirty-something man dressed in crisp new jeans, polo shirt, and v-neck sweater to the CSI.

"Mr. Singh," Sara said to him, "I'm with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Were you here when the robbery took place?"

Mr. Singh shook his head. "No. I arrived about twenty minutes ago, after Rick called to tell me the store was robbed."

"And Rick," Sara said, turning to look at the nervous clerk still sitting on the milk crates, "works here in the evenings?"

"Yeah," the manager nodded. "He works four evenings a week. This is the first time he's been here when the store was held up, though. You know this is the third time this year?"

Ignoring the statistic, Sara looked up at the damaged security camera. "How long has the security camera been in this condition?"

The manager and the detective both looked up at the camera. Mr. Singh shook his head again. "It was in perfect working order this morning when I left."

"Really," Sara said as she looked back at the clerk. Her eyes narrowed and she nodded slightly. This had the distinct feel of an inside job. "Well," she told the manager without looking away from Rick, "I better get busy so we can catch whoever did it this time."

"For real?" Mr. Singh's voice sounded surprised.

Sara turned to look at the manager again, a small but sly smile gracing the corner of her mouth. "For real."

Sunday Night, 11:03 PM

Grissom's house was dark. Catherine and Jim Brass approached his front door hesitantly. Grissom's townhouse was the second to the last third floor unit in a building that housed perhaps twenty renovated condominium homes in an old industrial complex. The hallway outside Grissom's front door was light tan paint over cinderblock. The doorframe of Grissom's unit was painted white and glowed slightly from the reflected florescent light recessed into the hallway ceiling. There was a dull wearing pattern around the doorknob that was usual for everyday handling. Both Catherine and Brass saw the dark smudge approximately five and a half feet from the floor on the inner edge, handle side of the door frame; head high for a man five eleven.

Brass knocked on the door loudly. "Gil Grissom! Grissom, you home?! It's Jim Brass!"

There was no answer.

He tried the knob and to his surprise, it turned easily in his hand. His surprise registered on his face when he looked back at Catherine. Brass gestured with his head for Catherine to stand behind him. When she nodded, he slowly opened the door to Grissom's home. Tentatively, Brass stepped inside.

"Grissom?!" Brass yelled again as he entered. Again there was no answer. Using the handkerchief from his coat pocket, Brass flipped on the entry light. Catherine was not far behind him despite his desire for her to stay safely back.

Brass was about to take another step in when he was stopped by a restraining hand on his shoulder.

"Jim, hold up," Catherine told the detective.

Turning, Brass saw that she was looking at the floor to his right. He followed her gaze and glimpsed what she had found. His stomach tightened at the sight of what was obviously, to a detective with over twenty years on the job, several drops of dried blood on the floor.


	5. Chapter 5

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 5/26)

by Cheers

Sunday Night 11:46 PM

A black Tahoe pulled up along the road and stopped, the headlights casting shadows past the far side of the three other vehicles stopped nearby. Warrick killed the engine, stepped out of the Tahoe, and headed for the farthest vehicle, where he could see a Nevada State Trooper bending over to look at something.

The something turned out to be Nick Stokes. Nick was crouched in the rear passenger side doorway spraying luminol over the passenger side rear seat of a '95 white Toyota Corolla with Arizona plates.

"What's up?" Warrick asked as he approached the two men.

The Trooper and Nick looked up as Warrick drew near. "Warrick Brown, CSI," Warrick introduced himself to the NHP officer.

"Cliff Thompson," the Trooper replied, nodding to the newly arrived CSI. "I found this vehicle abandoned here with an out-of-state tag. When I ran the plate, it came back stolen. I looked in the windows and saw the blood so I called for you guys."

Warrick's eyebrows shot up. "Blood, eh."

"Hey, Warrick," Nick greeted his friend. "I thought you had that 403?"

"Yeah, I did. Turns out it was a teenage boyfriend sneaking in a ground floor window. We caught the lovebirds in action."

Nick chuckled as he flipped on the ALS. "I bet you scared 'em for life."

Warrick smirked. "I bet their parents do." He bent down to watch as Nick moved the ALS wand into the back seat "I thought I'd come and babysit you."

"Watch and learn, my man," Nick retorted and turned his attention to the task at hand. The blue light from the ALS bathed the rear interior of the recovered vehicle. A good-sized section at the front edge of the back seat began to luminesce. The floor mat glowed with small spots and the back of the passenger side front seat demonstrated a widely scattered fine spray pattern.

"Whoa," Warrick whispered half under his breath. Trooper Thompson whistled softly.

"Something bad happened here," Nick said while handing his camera to Warrick, who took the cue and started snapping pictures before the luminol effect faded.

When he had finished Warrick said, "I'll call in the tow."

Monday Early Morning 00:11 AM

Sara's cellphone rang. She dropped the last print pickup tape in the envelope labeled "counter face" and reached for her cellphone.

"Sidle."

"Sara," Catherine's voice sounded in Sara's ear. The gravity of Catherine's tone said enough to make Sara's heart jump a beat.

Sara stood still and forced herself to breathe. She had a bad feeling about whatever Catherine had called to convey. Steeling herself for the worst, Sara told Catherine, "Tell me."

"I don't know where he is but we now have an official case. How close are you to finishing there?"

"I'm done," Sara confirmed. "What do you need me to do?"

"Drop what you have back at the lab and then meet me at Grissom's house. We have some processing to do here first."

Sara swallowed hard. "What about Nick and Warrick?"

There was a pause at the other end, and Sara was sure she heard Brass' muffled voice. Catherine said, "Okay," but not into the phone. When she did speak to Sara again she said, "They're on their way back to the lab now. Bring them with you when you come. I'll update everyone as soon as we're together. Coming?"

"Like the wind," Sara said and snapped her phone closed. There was going to be hell to pay if anything serious had happened to Gil Grissom. Sara would make damn sure of that.

Monday Early Morning 00:41 AM

He came awake with a start. The sensation of something crawling on his neck brought him out of a very shallow sleep. He snatched at his neck with his right hand and felt the squirming of something alive with more than a few legs. Without his glasses and without any light it was impossible to identify the offending interloper with any certainty. By the size and feel of the insect in question, he guessed it was some species of tiger beetle.

"I don't know who you are, pal," Gil told his many legged friend, "but I don't need another tenant right now."

Careful not to hurt the insect, Gil let the bug go on the ground and gingerly pushed himself back up into a sitting position, trying unsuccessfully to protect against more pain from his broken ribs. This maneuver was made more complicated by the compound fracture of his left wrist, making that limb almost useless. Once he had managed to sit up again, he cradled his left forearm in his lap and leaned back against the earth wall behind him. The temperature of the air and the deep darkness told him it was sometime around midnight. He had slept for perhaps an hour. This had become a pattern ever since he had awoke to find himself in this place. He was only able to sleep for brief periods of time and he was becoming more fatigued as the time wore on.

He had long since stopped bleeding. If the hunger and thirst would just give it a rest he'd probably be able to sleep despite the pain. Especially the thirst, he thought.

"Don't go there," Gil said out loud. "Think of something else. Think about the case."

He closed his eyes and tried to make his mind obey his voice. Gil had been trying to place the face of his attacker. The guy had said only six sentences to him:

He had unlocked his front door and had barely gotten the door open when:

"Gil Grissom?"

He turned at the sound of his name and was sucker punched for his trouble. The first blow sent him through his front door. His briefcase fell from his grip onto the floor, followed by his keys. The second blow, this one to the back of his neck, sent him to his knees. The blood from his cut lip welled up at the corner of his mouth almost immediately.

Even with slightly hazy awareness, the result of two blows to his head, he recognized the sound of a bullet being loaded in the chamber of a handgun. The slide snapped back, and when he looked up he was staring into the barrel of a loaded Ruger nine millimeter pistol.

"Remember me?"

Gil looked at his attacker and saw his face for the first time. He didn't recognize the man who held the gun.

"No," he said, as he ran his hand across his mouth to wipe away some of the blood and assess the damage. "Who are you?"

The sneer on the man's face faded into a wrathful indignation that gave Grissom his first real taste of fear. The attacker had expected Gil to know him.

"You took my life from me," the gunman informed him through half-clenched teeth. He held the gun in a determined yet relaxed and practiced grip. This wasn't the first time this guy had used a gun in the commission of a crime. Grissom got the distinct impression that pulling the trigger was something it would be all too easy for this guy to do. Something else he noticed – the guy wasn't wearing gloves.

Gil shook his head, ostensibly to signify lack of understanding but more importantly to try and clear the cobwebs that still clouded the edges of his mind. He wanted to place this guy. Remembering would help him understand what the hell was happening and why. He wasn't getting far with it and his attacker was becoming angrier with his silence.

"How?" Gil asked, hoping the man would want to tell him about this perceived injustice. "How was your life taken from you?"

He had miscalculated. Talking wasn't in the game plan for this particular aggressor. A cold rage filled the man's eyes. Grabbing Grissom's jacket collar, the man, who stood over six feet and outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, yanked him to his feet and shoved him toward the door. Gil stumbled forward and had to grab the doorjamb to keep from going down again. When the attacker approached him again Gil used his leverage from his grip on the doorjamb to force his shoulder into the side of the gunman.

His attacker was apparently expecting such a move, he had braced his feet and didn't lose his balance enough to go down, but he had to reach for the door to keep upright. Grissom spun around quickly, trying to take advantage of the opportunity. The gunman was quicker. The next blow was to Gil's midsection and doubled him in half.

"Try anything else and I'll shoot you right here," he was told icily. Gil didn't doubt that.

Without giving him time to recover much, the gunman pushed him out of the doorway and into the opposite wall. Another shove pushed them both down the hall, heading toward the fire doors at the end of the corridor and the back stairway.

They navigated the staircase and Grissom managed to leave blood on the railing of each flight and both fire doors. Gil had taken several sharp jabs from the gun barrel to his back while doing so. When they exited the building they were standing next to a white Toyota with the rear driver's side door open. Whatever this guy wanted to do to him, it wasn't going to happen here.

"You know you won't get away with this," Grissom said. It may have been a cliché but that didn't make it any less true.

"Shut the fuck up and get in."

A very hard jab of the gun barrel to his ribcage made Gil move to comply. He had only gotten one leg in when his attacker hit him again, this time nearly square in the face. Gil was sent head first into the back seat.

He was turned roughly onto his stomach and his hands were handcuffed behind him. The rear car door slammed shut and Gil pushed his feet hard against the inside door panel. He had a few seconds before the front driver's side door opened. Reaching over the seat, the gunman cuffed Grissom's legs through the rear door's handle grip, effectively preventing him from sitting up.

Blood was flowing from Gil's nose and down the back of his throat, forcing him to cough violently to keep his airway clear. The engine roared to life and Grissom fought to stay conscious as the car began to move. It was a battle he lost.

The sound of a door slamming brought him back to consciousness. Both pairs of cuffs had been removed and he was dragged from the back seat. Gil was having a hard time focusing, he was dizzy and sick to his stomach. At the very least, he had suffered a slight concussion. Time to figure out what the hell was happening was rapidly running out.

"Are you going to tell me what this is about?" Gil said hoarsely.

"I did the time, I might as well do the crime."

That was the last thing he heard before being shoved bodily down the shaft to his new home.

"I did the time, I might as well do the crime," Gil told the darkness.

That was it. Gil had processed the evidence in some case that sent this guy to prison. Beyond that, his attacker believed himself to be innocent.

He shivered in the cold night air. God, he was thirsty ….


	6. Chapter 6

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 6/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 01:30 AM

The door to Grissom's house stood open. Warrick, Sara, and Nick entered, each carrying their field kits. They found two uniforms, Jim Brass, and Catherine standing in a tight group in the center of the living room. All three arriving CSIs saw the blood on the floor carefully segregated by a demarcating yellow evidence flag. The smudge on the doorframe did not escape them either.

"Damn," Nick said softly.

Catherine saw them enter. "Hey," she said rather heavily.

Warrick had stopped in the doorway and was staring at a familiar green and brown leather briefcase lying on the floor three feet away from the blood. The briefcase's contents were partially spilled, including a cellphone and pager. A set of keys lay a foot beyond this near the base of the first of nearly a dozen bookcases housed within the confines of Grissom's home. He took a slow deep breath. "Damn, Gris."

"What do we know?" This was Sara. Her face was a hard, determined mask. All she wanted to do was get started. The sooner they did that the sooner they would figure out what the hell happened to Grissom.

Jim Brass moved to join Catherine and the other CSIs. He held up a brown case folder. Right this minute he needed to be the veteran detective, not the friend of the victim. "We are now investigating a four eighteen, four twenty-five," he told the CSIs in an all business manner. "Missing person: one Gil Grissom, missing since 2330 hours last Friday night, last seen at Sports Deluxe, Hard Rock Hotel and Casino sports bar on Paradise Road."

"What about the blood?" Nick asked. "Did you check …"

"Clinics," Brass interrupted, "hospital emergency rooms, Grissom's primary physician's office, 911 calls. No hits. His car is parked in his parking space outside."

The ominous note of the last piece of information brought an uneasy quiet with it.

After the shock of this information had set in, Catherine added, "I called Grissom's mother. She hasn't heard from him since Friday either. She doesn't know where he could be any more than we do."

Sara nodded and looked back toward the blood on the floor. "Then this must be the crime scene."

"Yeah," Catherine said grimly.

"Let's do it then," Nick said, his jaw set.

"I got prints," Sara offered, reaching into her jacket pocket and producing a jar of red print powder.

Warrick slowly nodded his approval. "Red Creeper."

"Serious crime," Nick started.

"Deserves serious print powder," Sara finished.

"Okay, do it," Catherine told her. Sara moved off immediately.

Catherine looked up at Warrick. "Take the corridor, elevator, and stairs. Find out how he left here."

"You got it." Warrick headed back out the door.

"I'll take the bedroom," Nick told Catherine. Although Catherine had been the closest of any of them to the boss, some things were best dealt with by another guy. By the look on Catherine's face, Nick knew his intuition was right on the money.

"Thanks, Nick," Catherine said, a note of relief in her voice. "I'll finish out here."

Nick gave her a reassuring smile and headed toward the back of the house.

Brass finished giving the uniforms their marching orders to check the dumpsters, alley ways, parking lots, and shops for several blocks in every direction. They exited with photocopied images of Grissom in hand, leaving Jim and Catherine alone in the living room. "More uniforms are on the way," he told her. "The Sheriff has been informed and he's authorized a search of Gil's past case files for potentials. We've got the APB out. I'm headed back to the sports bar to interview the staff who worked last Friday. We're covering all the bases."

He looked at her with his best poker face. Catherine knew as well as Jim did that the first thirty-six hours after a disappearance were crucial to a missing person's case. They were at least fifty hours out now. The implication was too horrid to put into words.

"We may be starting too late," Catherine told the detective. She ran her hand through her hair distractedly. "I know."

Monday Morning 01:56 AM

Mandy made steady progress with the prints from the 407. Sara's hunch had been correct. The prints on the camera matched the manager's and the clerk's. The freshest of these were the clerk's. Amazing how stupid people could be, Mandy mused. The almost total absence of prints from the cash register told them that the robbery suspect had wiped the register, which should have been completely covered with prints, but they had not thought to wipe the rear of the camera or the damaged cables.

There would be plenty of probable cause to bring the clerk in for further questioning, but Mandy knew that this would wait until days. She had already marked the case for transfer to Erik Watson on the dayshift per Sara's request. There was another case that trumped this one, and Mandy was trying to clear her backlog as quickly as possible.

When the prints from Grissom's house came in she would dedicate all her energies to processing them. The news of their Supervisor's disappearance had frightened everyone. The lab, though still busily going about the job of processing evidence, remained hushed. The usual hubbub of co-worker joviality was conspicuously absent. No one wanted to say what they all feared – that Grissom might be dead.

And Grissom was the steadiest and smartest person any of them had ever known. He was feared by some but respected by everyone. If you did your work well he respected you, and respect from someone like Grissom was the highest form of praise. Everyone working in the crime lab, whether they were willing to admit it or not, wanted the respect of Gil Grissom more than just about anyone else alive. He was just the kind of investigator and scientist that other people wanted to emulate.

Her throat tightened a little and Mandy realized she had stopped looking at the print on the table in front of her. She roused herself out of her reverie and threw her energies back into the work. She had to finish if she was going to be a part of finding her boss, and that particular job was one that everyone in the lab wanted to be involved with.

Monday Morning 02:02 AM

Greg stepped into Grissom's office like he was entering a shrine. The last time he had met with his boss here he had stormed in ready to accuse Grissom of biological terrorism. Now his ire then seemed silly.

It was as if Grissom represented the person Greg might become one day. Greg knew he was smart and he knew he was young. Grissom had been young once, too. Rumor had it, Grissom played poker in college to fund a body farm. Greg had sneaked a peak at Grissom's CV and knew that by the time Grissom was Greg's age he had completed his first graduate degree and had become the youngest coroner in Los Angeles County history. In his career, Grissom had published thirty-seven times in academic or forensics journals and had eight textbook chapters to his credit.

But what Greg wanted to do more than anything else was to be the investigator Grissom was. It wasn't just the brains, it was the instinct and deductive abilities that Grissom possessed that made him so different, and Greg wanted to learn that. He had come to think of Grissom as the master. Maybe that was weird, but that was just the way it was for him.

Greg looked around the office and found what he had come for. Moving toward the glass home of Grissom's orange-kneed tarantula, Greg set a box of crickets down on a corner of the desk. He had run out to get them after the conversation in the break room, when he had learned that Grissom was really missing.

"Hey there, buddy," Greg addressed the spider. "Are you hungry? I brought something for you."

He placed the crickets in with the tarantula and closed the lid. "There ya go, buddy. Bon appetit."

Greg watched the tarantula for a few minutes before turning to go. Retrieving the box from the desk again, he spotted Grissom's coffee mug. He stared at it for a moment. The saliva was over two days old but would still provide a decent sample.

He found a box of gloves on a shelf and donned a pair. Picking up the cricket box and the mug, Greg headed back to the DNA lab. He would begin his work on Grissom's case right now.


	7. Chapter 7

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 7/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 02:24 AM

Grissom's house was a conglomeration of insect zoo, laboratory, library, and living space. Tables covered with projects midway through completion contended with bookshelves for wall space. A terrarium housed his racing stock, hissing roaches from Madagascar. Bookshelves were filled to overflowing, and there were small piles of texts on the floor in corners and next to chairs. The walls housed a multitude of framed insects of various varieties, several beautiful art prints Catherine couldn't identify, and only a few of the many awards he must have received through the years. His house was like his office, clean but cluttered.

Catherine had made her way through the kitchen. Nothing was unusual there. Gil had two plates, a saucepan, two glasses, seven assorted eating and cooking utensils, and a single coffee cup all carefully rinsed and placed in the dishwasher. Both sinks were empty and clean. The counters were clean and neat. A single dishtowel was draped over the edge of the counter next to his refrigerator. The latter was filled with a surprisingly healthy assortment of foodstuffs in varying degrees of preparedness: precut salad, steaks, fresh vegetables, fruit juice, milk, a few bottles of beer. Also sharing the refrigerator space were a number of petrie dishes, bottles of various chemicals, collection jars filled with God and Grissom only knew what, and what she could only assume were multiple experiments in varying stages of progression.

The guest bathroom was spotless. Catherine guessed that it was used so rarely that only Sara's pass for prints would determine whether or not a living soul had stepped into the room for weeks.

She had moved on to the living room. When she turned on his television it was tuned to ESPN. "Well that figures," she muttered. The volume was a bit loud so she quickly turned the TV back off. The media unit was ordered with stereo and other electronic components, albums, DVDs, videos and CDs categorized by genre, a little heavier on the classical side then anything else but filled with quite an expansive variety of artistic expression. Calling Gil's collection eclectic was probably an understatement.

Turning from the entertainment center, she saw the cluttered coffee table. This housed a lamp, several days' worth of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, a coffee cup, a half-empty bottle of water and three books. The first of these was the present they had given him two months ago for his birthday – The New York Times Sunday Crossword Omnibus, Vol. 5. The book held 200 Sunday New York Times crossword puzzles, and thumbing quickly through the book Catherine found that he had completed more than half of them already. The inscription read, "Happy Birthday, Boss. Enjoy!" They had each signed it. The idea for this gift was Warrick's, and it was apparently a big hit. It was the first collective birthday gift that they had given him. Catherine still remembered the look of utter surprise on his face when they presented him with the wrapped gift that evening. Gil had not been expecting anyone at the office to remember much less mark his birthday.

A melancholy smile crossed her lips. "You're still not certain about this family you've acquired, are you?" she said as she set the crossword book down.

The second book was an osteology text, Identification of Pathological Disorders in Human Skeletal Remains. He had the second chapter entitled 'Types and Uses of Anthropometric Devices' bookmarked with a small notebook upon which he had been making notes. Nothing like light reading on your time off, she thought.

The last book was opened and turned face down on the edge of the table. It was a very beautiful copy of Hamlet opened to Act 1, Scene 5. She picked up on the same page where he had left off:

Ghost

I am thy father's spirit,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

Catherine stopped reading and sat down on the couch with the open book in her gloved hands. "A real renaissance man," she said softly. "Where are you, Gil? What happened to you?"

"He went down the fire stairs."

Catherine jumped a little and her head shot up. Warrick stood in front of her with a look of grim concern on his face.

Monday Morning 02:33 AM

"He's a hunk. What can I tell you?" the waitress who had served the guys last Friday told Brass. "He has this whole Kirk Douglas thing going with his chin, you know? And he had really pretty eyes. I just thought," she shrugged, "why not? I mean, nothing ventured, right?"

"Yeah, I guess." Brass shook his head in wonder. The waitress was Sandra Hutchinson. She had moved to Vegas from Sedalia, Missouri two years ago. The manager confirmed that she had worked in the Sports Bar for well over a year and was a dependable employee. Her background check came up clean except for the odd traffic ticket.

"Listen," he continued, "did you hook up with Kirk Douglas after you got off work that night?"

This time it was Sandra who shook her head. "He left before my shift was over. I never got his phone number. He was cute, but he wasn't really interested. A girl can tell." She shrugged again. "Maybe he wasn't in play."

"Married to his job," Brass said under his breath.

"Too bad," Sandra replied with a wistful grin.

Monday Morning 03:01 AM

"Man, I'm telling you. Gris must be a monk," Nick told the group now reassembled in Grissom's living room. "There's no indication that anyone else has been in his bedroom."

Nick saw the looks the three other CSIs gave him and instantly regretted his remark. The joke had been in poor taste. "Sorry."

His contrition made Catherine feel for him. This was bound to be hard on all of them. She touched his shoulder. "That's all right, Nick," she said gently. "He probably is."

Nick smiled weakly.

"I got a full handprint off the outside of the front door," Sara informed them, moving on. "I also lifted prints from the hallway and stairwell and from the doorjamb," she continued. "The usual places inside the house. It'll take a while to go through it all."

"Yeah, and I sampled all the blood here, in the hallway outside his front door, and in the stairwell. The trail ends just outside the building," Warrick informed them. "He had to have gotten into a vehicle of some kind in the alley out back. He could be anywhere."

"Then we'll look everywhere," Nick insisted. "We'll find him."

Catherine nodded. "Let's run it. None of the neighbors report hearing anything out of the ordinary. There are no signs of gunfire. We know he didn't seek medical attention, and there's a trail of blood leading out of the building. So … what happened?"

Warrick spoke up first. "The absence of blood anywhere else in the house makes me think he was tackled at the door."

They all moved to the entryway.

Sara followed Warrick's lead. "Person or persons unknown come up on Grissom as he's opening the door."

"And someone's injured right here," Nick added, stepping around the blood spots on the floor in the entry way.

"Then the struggle moves back out the door?" Warrick surmised.

Sara nodded pointing to the doorway. "Someone is pushed into the doorjamb leaving a blood smear here."

"They struggled," Nick continued, "forcing the aggressor to reach up to catch his balance." He reached up and placed his hand next to the print mark on the door.

"The struggle continued out into the hall," Warrick went on, moving toward the blood mark on the wall opposite Grissom's front door. "And then down the stairs." He pointed down the hall.

"He was trying to get away?" Nick asked.

"Or being taken away," Sara countered.

"No drag marks, though," Warrick interjected. "He was on his feet when he left."

"Any footprints? Shoe prints?" Catherine asked.

"A few from the landings," Warrick told her. "The stairs are those industrial metal ridged jobs. No way to lift a clean impression from them. Whatever shoes Gris was wearing, he took with him, so there's no way to compare his shoe prints with the ones I collected."

"Grissom is bowlegged," Sara offered thoughtfully.

"What?" Warrick replied, eyebrows furrowing.

"That's right," Nick was nodding. "He is. His stride would be unique. Most of the pressure would be on the ball and outside edge of his foot."

Warrick thought about that for a second. "It would, wouldn't it."

"We can check the wear pattern on his other shoes," Nick offered.

"Okay," Catherine said, drawing their attention. "Let's get what we have so far back to the lab. Sara, take a look at the handprint first. Warrick, get the blood to Greg and work on those shoe impressions. Bag his shoes. Take the comb and toothbrush Nick got from Grissom's bathroom with you, too. Greg can use them for DNA comparison. Nick and I will finish here. We've got Grissom's computer and personal papers to go through."

Sara didn't like the sound of that. "He'd freak if he knew what we are doing here."

They all knew that she was right. Grissom was an intensely private individual. It was uncomfortable to think about poking around in his personal stuff, but if they were going to try to reconstruct possible scenarios, they needed to know what was happening in the rest of Grissom's life - not just what little they could see at work.

"Not if we find him dead," Nick said.


	8. Chapter 8

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 8/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 04:09 AM

Nick rubbed at his face. Reading through Grissom's email was the closest he had ever come to feeling as if he were violating someone. Not that he was learning all that much about his boss.

Besides the office server traffic that Grissom downloaded to his home computer and the usual smattering of junk mail, there were only a few people with whom Grissom corresponded on a regular basis. Most of it was what Nick would expect from a workaholic guy without much time for a social life.

The last few weeks' worth of email consisted of various professional issues. The editor of Science & Justice was trying to persuade Grissom to do a series of articles on the role of entomological evidence in crime scene reconstruction. Grissom was planning his next seminar in Chicago in March with the American Board of Criminalists and the Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences. There was a request for a keynote address from the Royal Society of Medicine at their annual conference in London next July and another request for a keynote speech from the National Center of Forensic Science. This last email message had been read on Friday morning.

He was also corresponding with an anthropology professor from New Zealand, apparently participating in an ongoing chess game. The last move was made by Grissom last Wednesday. He corresponded, on and off, with Teri Miller. The last email from her was dated two weeks ago. Grissom had not, as yet, replied.

Grissom corresponded regularly with his mother. They talked about some class Grissom was thinking about taking, the art gallery Mrs. Grissom apparently sat on the board for, her health issues with arthritis, the latest bit of literature either of them had been reading, and the weather. Gris always signed his messages to his mother, "Your loving son." The last email Grissom had sent was on Thursday evening. He told his mother he would call her on Friday. That jibed with Catherine's call to her last night.

Catherine entered the room that served as Grissom's office at home and found Nick a bit bleary-eyed at the computer. "How's it going?" she asked.

Nick shook his head. "Sara's right, we shouldn't be doing this."

She sighed as she looked around Gil's home office. This room was filled almost to capacity with more bookshelves. These shelves held a vast collection of journals from just about every conceivable professional forensic organization not to mention newsletters, transcripts, old case files, notebooks, research note composition journals, and more textbooks. Several degrees hung in frames on the wall above his desk. A picture frame on his desk held a black and white photo of a woman who could only be Grissom's mother, and a smaller Polaroid of the nightshift CSI team from the Christmas party last year was stuck in the lower right hand corner of the frame. Everyone was smiling, even Gil.

"Procedure, Nick," Catherine told him. "Procedure."

"I know," he replied. "But it still feels wrong."

"Well, I went through his mail and didn't find much except for a cable bill and a pre-approved credit card offer. There's nothing else out there. What did you find in here?" she asked.

Nick took a deep breath before starting. "I can tell you he doesn't do his banking online. He has an eBay account, but he hasn't used it for over four months. He plays chess with a professor of anthropology in New Zealand and he writes to his mother regularly." He paused and sat back from the computer. "There's really not that much here and really nothing to suggest a reason for an attack or … worse."

Nick fell silent. Catherine could tell something else was bothering him. "Tell me," she said.

He swallowed heavily before continuing. "He's a regular guy, Cath. He pays his bills on time, shows up to work every day, and works harder than anyone I've ever met. He just goes around being … well, Grissom. I mean, look at this." Nick pointed out the TTY sitting on Grissom's desk next to his phone. "We know he knows sign language. He has a deaf communication device. He knows about dwarves and schizophrenics."

"And?" Catherine asked, hearing the silent 'but' he didn't say. She left the TTY reference alone, having decided not to tell the team about Gil's mother's deafness unless it became necessary.

Nick looked up at her. "It's got to be related to one of his cases. I mean, sure Gris could ruffle feathers but it was always about the job, nothing personal. He has a way of demanding the best from people. Sometimes they don't … well, sometimes they don't measure up all that well."

"Nobody's perfect," Catherine told him. "Not even Grissom."

"Yeah, but he sure as hell tried hard to be the best," Nick insisted. "I mean, look at all this stuff." He gestured around the room. "The man's a walking encyclopedia. There doesn't seem to be anything he isn't willing to learn. He's being asked to speak and to teach at all these conferences, to write articles and at the same time he's talking to his mom about taking a class this semester at a local college."

"That's our boss," she affirmed.

Nick was still shaking his head. "I worry about getting my pants on right every morning. If I could be just half as smart as Grissom …." Nick stopped and took a deep breath. "You know, I told him once that I wanted him to think I was a good CSI."

"You are." Catherine told him honestly. "No one works for Grissom for long unless they've got some game, Nicky. You know that."

"I know," he said. "But it's taken a while. I wasn't exactly … a natural."

"Yeah, but you're plenty smart, Nick. You've got good instincts. The rest you can learn."

Nick nodded. "Yeah, I can," he said quietly, swallowing back his emotion, "from him."

She patted him on the shoulder. "Just like the rest of us, Nicky," Catherine said gently. "Just like the rest of us."

Monday Morning 04:11 AM

Sleep wouldn't come for more than a few minutes at a time, so he gave up on it for the time being. Wispy clouds were moving across the small patch of night sky he could see, obscuring the stars from his view.

His pain was not as bad now as it had been. He was saving strength for the work he had to do after dawn. He was so thirsty that it was becoming hard to speak. His mouth was too dry for him to form the words well. He had to keep his mind busy. Try not to think about the thirst, he told himself. Think about the case.

Closing his eyes, Gil tried to place the face again. If this guy had gone to jail for a crime Gil had investigated, it would have been several years ago. Kidnapping, negligent homicide, and second degree murder all carried pretty lengthy sentences. If his attacker had "done the time" for a crime that resembled what he was trying to accomplish now, he would have been in prison for at least seven years, probably longer. If it had been fifteen or twenty years, this guy's case could go back to Gil's time in Los Angeles County.

Gil had worked on thousands of cases in his career as a CSI. Of those, how many involved dumping a person, alive or dead, in an abandoned mine? He could only think of four cases, and all the participants involved in those cases were either dead or still in prison.

This guy just didn't ring a bell. Gil was missing something, some piece of the puzzle that would help him understand. He had been attacked at his home, taken by force, and dumped in this mineshaft. His attacker had said he had already done the time.

What if the original case hadn't involved an attack? Or maybe it hadn't involved leaving someone to die? If this guy feels he hadn't committed a crime, Gil reasoned, maybe the circumstances had been an accident – an accident that left a person alone to die in a mineshaft. Or was that wrong as well?

What if it wasn't a mineshaft but another kind of shaft? He wondered. Had he worked on a dead body case in another kind of shaft?

Gil's eyes popped open as recognition dawned. He hadn't been a CSI when he had worked the case. If he was right, he had been much younger.


	9. Chapter 9

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 9/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 04:27 AM

The evidence examination table glowed up at him as he laid out the print impressions and shoes on it. Warrick had finished making impressions from two pairs of Grissom's shoes: some tennis shoes Grissom had put some decent wear on and a pair of loafers Warrick had seen him wearing at the office several times. Nick had been right. Grissom's shoes did have a unique wear pattern, ball to outside edge of the foot, the left shoes more so than the right. That pattern matched one set of shoe prints from the landings in the stairwell of Grissom's building. Warrick had been able to lift them using the electrostatic dust-print lifter. They were a size eleven, as well. Same shoe size as Grissom wore. There was no doubt about it - Grissom had gone down the emergency stairs recently. If the blood Warrick had collected from the handrail matched Grissom then it was a good bet that he was injured the last time he made the trip.

There was another set of impressions that didn't match Grissom's size and wear pattern. These were a size thirteen with a more normal wear pattern on the soles. By the looks of the tread, they were work boots of some kind. Warrick would have to go through the shoe tread database to be certain.

When he looked up from the shoe impressions, he found Sara standing just inside the doorway. Her expression was unreadable.

"How long have you been there?" Warrick asked.

Sara tilted her head a little. "Long enough to see you make the match."

"What'd you find with the prints?" he asked her.

"The handprint from the door isn't Grissom's. Mandy's running it threw AFIS. No hits yet. Some of the prints on the banister in the stairwell match the handprint. Whoever it was took the stairs out."

"What about Grissom's prints?" Warrick pressed.

"Positive match to the bloody fingerprints," Sara said solemnly, "both in the hall and in the stairwell."

"Yeah," Warrick said, returning his attention to the evidence on the table. "It was Grissom going down those stairs all right." He fell silent. They already knew something bad had happened. It just felt like every new piece of evidence was another nail in a coffin nobody wanted to think about.

"Hey, Warrick, did you ever think about it?" Sara asked, almost as if she could read his mind.

"About what?" he responded suspiciously, a little startled by the coincidence.

"What it might be like after," she replied.

"What? After he left CSI?" Warrick said, knowing they were talking about Grissom. "No."

Sara moved into the room and stood across the table from Warrick. She picked up one of Grissom's shoes to look at it more closely. "I never did. I figured he'd always just be here. Like, he belonged more than any of us."

"I know what you mean. He lives and breathes this stuff." Warrick said, nodding toward the table.

"I didn't understand that. Not really." Sara confided. Her voice was filled with what sounded to Warrick like regret. "I've said some pretty awful things to him."

Warrick's eyes narrowed. "No way."

"For real," she said, meeting his gaze squarely.

"Like what?" Warrick wondered aloud.

She set the shoe back down on the table. "I accused him of partiality," Sara confessed, "of not having any feelings."

"Who, Gris?" he replied, a little surprised. "He feels it, believe me."

"I know," Sara nodded. "I do. It just seems like he …." She paused, not sure where to go with her thought.

"Controls it - holds it in," Warrick finished for her. "Yeah, I know it seems that way. I guess he does. But he has his outlets."

"Rollercoasters?" Sara asked.

"Rollercoasters," he confirmed with a little smile, remembering his own trip on the tracks with Grissom.

"I told him once that I wished I could be more like him," she continued after a moment. Her voice filled with emotion. "Feel nothing, care less." Sara brushed a tear off her cheek as if it were offending her. "Truth is, I do want to be more like him. I do because he does care. He believes in himself, trusts his instincts - trusts his friends." She folded her arms protectively.

"He trusted me when no one else did," Warrick told her.

"Like me." It wasn't a question but a statement. Warrick could see the honest regret in Sara's face.

"I didn't mean that," he said immediately. There was no need to open old wounds.

"I know. That doesn't make it any less true," she said softly.

"Look, Sara," Warrick told her. "Gris took a chance with me. He went against orders. I told him I wouldn't let him down again. It's been one of the hardest promises I've ever made, but it's a promise I've tried to keep."

"Because you made it to him?"

"Yeah," he said, nodding slowly, "because I don't like the idea of letting him down any more than you do."

They both fell silent again, listening to the hum of the light from the evidence table and dealing with their own private feelings.

Finally Sara asked the question she knew no one wanted to ask. "What if we're too late?"

"I can't think about that," Warrick said firmly. He didn't want to have to deal with the implications of that. He had a promise to keep. There was no way he was going to let Grissom down again. "We'll find him," Warrick told Sara. "We have to."

Monday Morning 04:39 AM

The Sheriff, Brian Mobley, and Conrad Eckley were waiting for Catherine when she and Nick got back to the crime lab. The men stood in Grissom's office and turned to look at her as Catherine and Nick approached the door.

Catherine saw Eckley and the Sheriff a split second before Nick did and pulled up short. Nick noticed she had stopped walking and looked at her. He followed her gaze and realized Grissom's office wasn't empty.

"Nick," Catherine told the junior CSI, "why don't you find out what Sara and Warrick have now. Tell them I'll see them in a minute."

"Sure," Nick told her, looking from the visitors back to Catherine. "I'll be just down the hall if you need me." With that, Nick set off to find Sara and Warrick. He had a pretty good idea what this visit from Eckley and the Sheriff was all about.

The Sheriff nodded to her as Catherine stepped into the office. "Catherine."

"Sheriff, Conrad," she greeted them coolly. "What can I do for you gentlemen?"

Eckley glanced at the Sheriff. He looked too smug for Catherine's liking. Conrad didn't say anything.

It was the Sheriff who was going to tell her the bad news. "I'd like to talk about Gil's case," he started. "I think there's some important decisions we need to make at this juncture in the investigation."

"Politic to the last, aren't you Brian," Catherine replied.

"I think it would be better for all concerned if Conrad and his dayshift team took over the investigation of the case," Mobley told her. "You're too close to it."

"That's not going to happen," Catherine informed them. Before the Sheriff could interrupt her she went on. "No one is more motivated than we are. And if Gil has a prayer in hell of being found then we need some people with an honest desire to find him."

"You don't think I want to find Gil?" Conrad asked, sounding wounded.

Catherine turned to face Eckley squarely. "I don't suppose you've told the Sheriff about the page you received on Saturday."

By the look on his face, Catherine knew that he hadn't. "I thought so."

"What page?" Mobley asked, obviously confused.

"Look," Conrad began.

Catherine interrupted him, "Grissom was paged about a case on Saturday afternoon," she told the Sheriff. "When he didn't respond to repeated pages, the office paged Conrad. How many times since Gil has worked here has he failed to answer a page, Conrad?"

Eckley shuffled his feet nervously. Catherine didn't bother to wait for an answer.

"I'll tell you. None." She turned her attention back to the Sheriff. This was obviously news to Mobley. "If Conrad had bothered to tell someone about that we could have been on this case as little as twelve hours after we think Gil was attacked, not fifty." Catherine wasn't even bothering to keep the bitterness out of her voice any more.

"Look, Brian. I'm staying on this case. If it were any one of us out there, even Conrad," she gave the dayshift supervisor an angry look, "Gil would be the first CSI on board and the one to work the hardest to find out what happened." Her voice was filled with her conviction. "This is Grissom we're talking about. I'm not leaving him out there without exhausting every tool at my disposal. Every member of this shift feels the same way."

The Sheriff looked from Catherine to Eckley and back again. She could practically see the wheels turning in his head. He nodded as he came to a decision. "All right, Catherine. You stay in charge of the case, but I want you to keep me in the loop. Don't use Gil's example as a model on this. I want regular updates on the progress you're making."

"I'll keep you posted," she told him. "You have my word."


	10. Chapter 10

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 10/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 04:40 AM

Greg looked out through the windows of the DNA lab and saw Nick coming up the hall. Grabbing up the report, Greg rushed out to meet the CSI.

"Nick!"

Nick stopped in his tracks. Greg practically skidded to a stop in from of him.

"What is it, Greg?"

"Hot off the presses," Greg informed him. "I got a match."

"A match?" Nick ask, a bit confused. "In Grissom's case?"

"Yeah," Greg said without the usual bravado.

"From the blood we found at his house?"

"No, I'm still working on that. This is something else," Greg told him and handed Nick the report.

Confusion was replaced by comprehension as Nick took the paper and read the results. He looked at the graphic of the thirteen markers. They all matched.

Nick barely took the time to thank Greg before sprinting down the corridor.

Monday Morning 04:48 AM

"Warrick!"

Sara, Catherine and Warrick heard Nick seconds before he practically ran through the door of the evidence examination room. Catherine had just arrived and was telling Sara and Warrick about her conversation with the Sheriff and Eckley.

"Warrick," Nick repeated.

"Yeah," Warrick responded.

Nick's words seemed to stumble over each other trying to get out of his mouth. "You called in the tow on the 411, right?"

Warrick's eyebrows furrowed. He was trying to catch up with his friend. "The car you found out on Blue Diamond?"

"Yeah, man. You called the tow in?" Nick asked again.

"Yeah, I did."

"The car's not here. I checked. Are you sure?" Nick pressed.

"I called," Warrick told him. "The driver said they'd have it here by morning. They're backed up tonight."

"What's this about, Nick?" Catherine asked.

"The blood I found in that car," Nick informed his co-workers, "is Grissom's."

Monday Morning 05:12 AM

Jim Brass had spent the past several hours working with the team of officers assigned to going through Grissom's old case files. They were looking for individuals who might have a motive to attack and abduct Gil. The list that they were compiling included everyone who had been incarcerated as a result of an investigation involving Grissom, who was now out of jail, and who was not verifiably out-of-state last Friday evening.

The list was astonishing in its length. Grissom has been a busy, busy boy. Either that or he was very good at his job. Jim knew it was a combination of both.

Brass looked at the list they had compiled so far and sighed. With both cops and criminalists, the problem of accumulating people with motive enough to cause great bodily harm was the same. It was an occupational hazard. Everyone knew the risks involved with the work. The better you were at the job, the longer the list. Put away a bad guy, gain an enemy for life.

It didn't take a long career to bring the dangers of the job home. The lesson they had all learned from the loss of Holly Gribbs was one none of them would soon forget. It only takes one bad guy to end a career … or a life.

Jim stood up and headed out of his office. It was time to do what detectives did best - the legwork.

Monday Morning 05:23 AM

A white '95 Toyota Corolla sat in the garage of the crime lab. Its delivery had taken several calls to Lewes Towing, the company contracted with the LVMPD for police impound towing, including Criminalistics. Surprisingly, it had been Sergeant O'Riley who had expedited the arrival of the suspect vehicle at the lab. He had gone to school with the owner of the towing company, and when Brass said something about the holdup, O'Riley had made a call that placed this vehicle at the top of the priority list.

Catherine watched from the window in the hall outside the garage as Nick, Warrick, and Sara divided up duties and set to work processing the vehicle. There was nothing she would have wanted more than to be involved in collecting the evidence from the car - except possibly the opportunity to scream at Gil Grissom for getting himself into so much trouble.

This Toyota was the first real piece of good news they had received since the "official" investigation into Grissom's disappearance had begun. It seemed like an eternity since the night before when they had all asked each other if anyone had seen Gil. What had been a curious and unsettling inquiry had turned into an ugly reality so quickly that she really hadn't had time to adjust to what had happened.

Now, Catherine was "officially" in charge of the investigation, and that son of a bitch Eckley was making sure all the other cases that had come into CSI over the last few hours were being assigned to guys from the dayshift. She had made it very clear to Eckley that if he wasn't going to give this case one hundred percent of his effort, he needed to stay the hell away from it.

There wasn't much talk amongst the team as they began the process of examining every inch of the vehicle. Catherine knew they were in the zone, and that there wasn't anything that would escape them. The transfer from the attacker or attackers would be found. It could be days before AFIS gave them a hit off the prints they had found at Grissom's, if it gave them a hit at all. The car might lead them in the right direction more quickly. She only hoped that what they found led them to Gil soon, and that he was still alive.

"You better be alive," she told the missing Grissom. "I'm going to kick your ass when we find you." She turned and headed out of the crime lab. Catherine had Lindsey to deal with this morning before returning to work and the very unpleasant prospect of updating Mrs. Grissom as she had promised.


	11. Chapter 11

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 11/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 06:07 AM

The initial search of the Toyota turned up very little. The team took all the necessary initial photographs and finished a preliminary visual search. The trunk and glove compartment were both completely empty. There was an old napkin under the front passenger seat, and this was bagged and sent to Greg. No other items were found in the interior compartment. Any evidence they collected would have to be the kind not immediately noticeable. The kind most people don't think to worry about. The kind of evidence a good CSI knows to look for.

Sara swirled the dusting brush over the panel on the inside of the front driver's side door. Once the dusting powder was evenly distributed, she visually searched and researched every square inch of surface, tape-lifting any print or partial print she found. When that was done, she moved to the dashboard. As soon as she was through, she would take the prints she had to the print lab for processing and move to the back seat.

Nick already knew the blood samples he had collected earlier from the back seat of the stolen vehicle belonged to Grissom. He needed to know if there was any more blood in the car: Grissom's, an attacker's, or otherwise. He was also looking for transfer of hair or other fibers. He used a small handheld ALS to visually search every inch of the rear passenger compartment. He found several short, curly gray and brown hairs where he had previously found Grissom's blood. These he collected, labeled, and sent to Greg in the DNA lab.

The upholstery, carpet fibers, and foreign materials were Warrick's purview on this gig. He had started in the trunk because Nick was dealing with the blood in the back seat while Sara was lifting prints in the front. Warrick had already taken a two inch by two inch section of the interior carpet from the trunk. He would also take a sample of the upholstery fabric from the rear portion of the back seat once Nick was done. Warrick tape-lifted samples of the detritus he found in the trunk. As Sara moved to the passenger side of the front seat, Warrick moved to the driver's side and began his visual inspection of the floorboard there. He found what looked like small pieces of crushed black glass. He collected specimens from the floor mat, gas pedal, and brake pedal. If the driver of the car was involved with Grissom's disappearance, some of the bits of glass could easily have been transferred into the building where Grissom lived.

"I've got the owner in case anyone is interested."

All three CSIs stopped what they were doing and looked up at the speaker. Sergeant O'Riley stood at the door to the garage.

"Hey, O'Riley," Nick called.

"What'd you find out?" Sara asked.

O'Riley opened the folder he held and gave them a rundown of the information he had collected. "Owner is Robert Sellers. He lives at 1127 West Navajo Road, Flagstaff, Arizona. He works for Coconino County New Energy Technologies as a renewable energy specialist – solar technology. Local police verify he reported the car stolen from the company parking lot six days ago. By all accounts, Mr. Sellers is a stand-up guy: wife, two kids, steady on the job. No connection to Grissom that we can find. Fingerprint card is being faxed to us as we speak."

"The fingerprints will help with elimination," Sara said to no one in particular.

"Flagstaff," Warrick said thoughtfully. "That's off I-40."

"It is," O'Riley confirmed.

"I-40, crossroads of the southwest," Nick added. "Doesn't narrow the search for our car thief much, does it?"

"I take it there's no hit on the prints from his house," O'Riley said.

Sara's face told him the story before she said a word. "Not yet."

Monday Morning 06:56 AM

Almost as soon as Catherine returned to the crime lab, her beeper went off. Looking at it, she recognized the Sheriff's number. It was time to update the good Sheriff, but before she did that she wanted to check in with the team and see where they were.

Catherine found all three of her CSI co-workers right where she had left them. They were still hard at work processing the Toyota.

"Hey, guys," she said as she entered the garage.

Warrick stood up from his position on the other side of the car to look at her. "How's Lindsey?"

"She's fine. I left her with my sister." Catherine stooped to look inside the car. "Find anything?"

Nick looked up from the back seat where he and Sara were finishing up with the last of the fingerprint lifts. "Tons of prints," he began. "Sara's already sent a bunch to the print lab. I found a few errant hairs that look like they could be Grissom's. No more blood though. Warrick found some ground black glass on the driver's floorboard."

"Yeah," Warrick jumped in. "And those shoe prints I found in the stairway were from a pair of Red Wing boots. I'm thinking we need to go back and see if there's any transfer in Grissom's building."

"Any idea what kind of glass?" Catherine asked.

"Nah," Warrick said. "Trace is working on it now."

"Okay," Catherine said, standing back up. "Warrick, you and Nick go back and see what you can find."

"And me?" Sara asked.

"Stay with the prints," Catherine said. "The sooner we have a match, the sooner we have a suspect we can find."

Catherine's beeper chose that instant to go off again. When she looked, she wasn't surprised to see the Sheriff's number displayed.

Monday Morning 07:25 AM

Sara was in the print lab while Warrick and Nick were on their way back to Grissom's house. Catherine had called the Sheriff and given him a full update on their progress. She decided that now was a good time to update Gil's mother as well.

Catherine again collected the information she needed and headed back to the TDD station. This was a task she was not looking forward to. As she walked her mind's eye could easily see a young curly blond-headed boy bounding across a yard and throwing himself into the waiting arms of a woman who had the same warm face pictured in the frame on Gil's desk.

When you had children, you were a mother for life. No amount of growing up would make Gil any less his mother's son. Catherine already knew what it was like to fear for a friend. She could only imagine the panic that must be fearing for a child, no matter how old, who was lost.


	12. Chapter 12

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 12/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 07:43 AM

The DNA results started to come back. He had compared the two hairs Nick had sent from the suspect vehicle to the hairs from Grissom's comb and found a perfect match. Greg felt his heart sink further and further as each new sample of blood tested came back with the same result.

Compiling the reports into a single folder, he set out from his lab to find Catherine. No way he was going to beep her with this.

Monday Morning 07:46 AM

Larry Collins was working in Trace when the samples from Grissom's case came in. The samples from the suspect vehicle, the toothbrush and comb Greg sent over from DNA, and the few tape-lifted samples from Grissom's house sat on his lab counter. Like everyone else in Criminalistics, Larry wanted to be a part of finding out what had happened to his boss.

Grissom was the kind of man that other guys wished they could be more like. He was a legend. Larry didn't deny that he felt that way. Not in the privacy of his own thoughts, anyhow.

Someone was going to uncover the crucial piece of evidence that would tell them where Grissom was. Was is selfish to want to be that guy? Probably, he decided. But selfish or not, Larry really did want to be the guy who broke the case. Not just because it would mean maybe saving Grissom's life, but because it would mean other people at the lab would give him some of the same respect Grissom enjoyed.

He had heard the hushed conversations in the break room and listened to everyone go on about how they just wanted Grissom to be okay. Perhaps they all did, but everyone likes to make a mark, to be the hero. That sort of thing seemed to come so easily to Grissom. Maybe … well maybe now it was Larry's turn to shine.

Monday Morning 07:48 AM

"Day three," he managed to choke out with an extremely dry mouth. A small sliver of sunlight made its way to the bottom of the mineshaft. Gil moved to sit in the warm glow of the sunshine. He only had a few short hours of direct light each day. He had to take advantage of it.

He worked on his makeshift sling again. It was the only thing that he had tried since finding himself down here that seemed to work, but using the sling was wearing on him. His shoulder and ribcage ached. He was becoming weaker with each passing hour and didn't know how long he could keep it up.

Broken ribs kept him from raising his right arm above the level of his shoulder but with a web tied from his shoe laces and secured to the metal loop at the end of his belt he had been able to fashion a decent sling. Using the sling underhanded, he was able to get enough velocity on the rocks and throw them high enough into the air to do some good. Gil thought that if he managed to send rocks up on the ledge above his head often enough, he would disturb enough earth that anyone looking down into the shaft would realize something or someone had recently fallen in. The trick was to keep from being hit by the rocks as they rolled back down the slope again and dropped back into the shaft. He remembered just how long the drop was.

The wind had been knocked out of him when he landed at the bottom of the shaft. He had lain still for a long time to recover from the fall and waited for the sickening nausea to subside enough to sit up. Once he was able to move around, he had begun to explore his prison. It had taken him half a day to determine that he was in some kind of mining pit. The support timbers had degraded to such a degree that Gil had concluded it was abandoned. The bottom of the pit was much wider than the opening, which made a nearly twenty degree slanted turn at about fifteen feet above the bottom of the shaft. The walls inclined inward at nearly the same slope. Climbing out would be nearly impossible even for someone in good health and uninjured.

In his current condition, Gil was trapped. He had been for three days.

He had a compound fracture of the left radius and ulna sustained in the fall into the shaft, at least one broken rib, perhaps two, and he was pretty sure his nose was broken. The progressive dehydration and insidious fatigue compounded by constant pain made him a poor candidate to successfully scale a flight of stairs. That thought brought a half smile to his face. No point in completely losing his sense of irony.

Gil didn't like his chances. The amount of blood he had lost should be sufficient to arouse significant suspicion if someone knew where to look. But the odds that his team would find the car used to bring him to this place were not in his favor. There was no way to climb out and no way to communicate with the world outside the pit except to yell, but by now his voice was all but gone. The base of the shaft couldn't be seen well from the entrance above. He estimated he was at least twenty feet below ground level, maybe more. His attacker had planned this dump well. Gil had to give him that.

His initial search and multiple subsequent searches of the shaft reinforced the feeling of entrapment. There was a small horizontal tunnel that extended into the ground approximately eight inches from the base of the shaft in the west wall, but the opening was far too narrow to allow passage of a man. The purpose of this tunnel was a complete mystery to him. Perhaps it was an air shaft to allow fresh air to reach the bottom of the pit when machinery was in use, or perhaps it had provided a conduit for power cables or pipes of some kind. Besides this tunnel, a few assorted bits of rusted metal, rotting timbers, and rocks, there wasn't much in the way of help for him.

He had been dumped there to die. The good news was that he wasn't dead yet. The bad news was that if someone didn't find him soon, he would be.

Monday Morning 08:12 AM

Sara sipped at her coffee and stared at the screen as the computer ran through the myriad prints that made up the AFIS database. It had been hours since Mandy had inputted the handprint from Grissom's front door. Everyone knew that an AFIS search could easily take days, but Sara knew that Grissom probably didn't have that kind of time.

Why was it taking so long? Thirty-six hours. Everyone knew that there were only thirty-six hours after a disappearance to find someone with any real chance that they might still be alive. After that the probability of finding Grissom alive dropped precipitously. They were at hour fifty-six now … and counting. "Damn it," Sara said to the empty room.

What was it Warrick had said last night? That Grissom thought he would leave CSI and no one would notice. No cake in the break room, he'd just be gone. How could Grissom think that he could just walk away and no one would care? What the hell was he thinking when he said that? A single tear ran down her cheek. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"Hey. No emotions in here."

Sara looked up and saw Grissom leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed, a knowing half-smile on his face.

"It's taking too long," she told him quietly. "Fifty-six hours…."

"You can't get too close to the victim."

She looked into his blue eyes. "He's special to me. I can't help it."

He blinked at her. "It's just a case, Sara."

"Not to me," she said softly, another tear finding its way down her face. "Not to any of us. You should know that."

She closed her eyes once more, trying to force the tears to stop. When she glanced up again, he was gone.

Sara looked back at the computer screen, willing it to tell her something, anything. "Come on," she said through gritted teeth. As if taking her command literally, the displayed graphic began to flash and the computer beeped at her.

AFIS had found a match.


	13. Chapter 13

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 13/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 08:23 AM

Jim Brass turned the knob to his office door and pushed the door open with his foot. He reached his desk chair and dropped rather than sat into it. He was beat. It had been over fourteen hours since he had left his home and gone to work. He had no idea how long it would be before he saw his bed again. One thing was certain - it wouldn't be today.

Leaning his elbow on his desk, he ran a hand over his face. Jim grimaced as his hand moved over the rough stubble of his beard. He didn't want to know what he looked like. He took out the electric razor that he kept in the second drawer for those all too frequent occasions when he was away from home for far too long. There was still a great deal of work to be done.

Damn Grissom. The list of potential suspects in this case was too long, and it would take too much time to check on every name. Time Grissom didn't have. The man had proven himself too good at his job.

Calling what Grissom did a job was probably an injustice, Jim mused. Gil didn't have a job as much as he was the job. This was something Jim understood. He had known police officers who did the job and he had known police officers who just were cops – at the core of who and what they were was the need to be a cop, not just do the job. The same was true for Gil Grissom. Somewhere there had to be a special dictionary with descriptions of all the professions there had ever been. If there were such a volume, he was sure that Grissom's picture illustrated the entry for a crime scene investigator.

Being a criminalist fueled Grissom. His list of completed cases was impressive. Since Gil had joined the Las Vegas Crime Lab, it had moved from fourteenth to second among forensic labs across the nation. That was no coincidence. Grissom's passion for forensics made it happen. Jim had seen it with his own eyes. Although most of the time he had given the credit to the expansion of the metropolitan Las Vegas area, the infusion of funding into the police force, the effort he himself had put into the running of the unit, and the general advancements in the science of forensics itself. All of those things had helped, no doubt about it. But none of it would have elevated the lab so significantly without a scientific mind with a passion for justice, quirky though it may be. Wrap it all up in a bow and you get Grissom with a capital G.

Jim turned on the razor and set about the task of shaving off his eight AM shadow. He did it mechanically while his mind returned to the impossible task of deciphering the enigma that was Gil Grissom.

Quirky probably wasn't the best way to describe him. A living study in paradox was better. Jim knew that Grissom was what women considered handsome. Their experience in the Sports Bar on Friday night was proof enough of that. With the two young studs, Brown and Stokes, sitting at the same table, the guy the waitress went for was the middle-aged geek with a penchant for bugs and dead bodies. Man, life was bizarre.

When Grissom opened his mouth, you never knew what he would say – he could share the oddest piece of trivial minutia that popped into his head, or he might admit that he had just made a mistake. How many people in the world are willing to tell you about what they didn't do right? Not a hell of a lot.

The Kaye Shelton case was the most vivid reminder of Grissom's integrity that Jim could think of. When his bugs had said that the victim was dead three days instead of five, everyone thought a murderer would go free. Then Gil figured out he had made a mistake. The crazy guy sat up with a dead pig wrapped in a blanket for nearly a week to prove his own mistake and nab the husband. When the lunatic Sheriff shot down the evidence, Grissom and his team went back to square one and proved the husband was guilty anyway, without the bugs. Damnedest thing Jim had ever seen. Months later, Jim had overheard Eckley grumble about Grissom getting the case published in some nerd rag. The scientist in Grissom couldn't leave the case alone any more than the investigator would.

Grissom was the go-to guy for information concerning just about anything you'd care to name. Ask him a question he didn't know the answer to and he'd gladly tell you he didn't have a clue. Ask him the same question twenty-four hours later and you'd probably get more detailed information than you really wanted on the matter. That was Grissom.

He was also a natural leader with a hatred for advancement. Why be the boss if it means letting someone else have all the fun doing the drudge work? But then, Gruesome Grissom never met a corpse or a crime scene he didn't like. It was the drudge work, the investigation that made the man stand out from among his peers. Grissom loved the puzzles. Solving them was the reward. It didn't matter to Grissom who noticed how good he was at his job. Hell, he'd probably do the job for free if the county would offer to feed and house him.

And that was the single most annoying aspect of the man's character. Grissom didn't care who was involved. He had no political savvy, no fear of reprisal, no need to impress, no desire to placate. If there was a crime committed, no matter by whom or for what reason, Grissom was determined to solve the mystery and see that justice was done. Gil stepped on toes often. Important toes. Powerful toes. Goddamned Grissom had stepped on the Sheriff's toes so often that the poor man would probably have started to wear steel-toed shoes around the criminalist if he thought it would make Grissom go easier. That was a pipe dream.

The mental image of the Sheriff in steel-toed shoes made Jim smile. It annoyed the hell out of Jim when Grissom had a burr under his saddle about something, but it usually made for good theater. And, as with all really good theater, when Grissom was involved, the good guys usually won the war. John Wayne would be proud.

Yeah, Jim thought, but even the Duke bought it in the end of The Sands of Iwo Jima. An enemy sniper took the hero out despite the success of the allied forces. What did it matter if the result of all the work Grissom had done was that there were so many potential suspects to wade through that there was no way they were going to find the right guy with the right motive, the right opportunity, and the right handprint in time to do a damn bit of good? Jim had a detail of eleven guys out helping. Even with that kind of manpower, they were looking at another full day before exhausting what possibilities they had. And there was no guarantee that the person or persons they were looking for was on the list in the first place.

Just finish with the razor and get back at it, he told himself. Before he was able to quite finish shaving, his cellphone began to ring.

"Now what?" he muttered.

Turning off the razor, Jim pulled his phone out of his inside coat pocket and answered it. "Brass."

"Brass, Sidle. AFIS gave us something."

Monday Morning 08:38 AM

Catherine had just gotten back to the conference room after telling Grissom's mother about the official case when Greg Sanders had shown up at the door. He had hand carried the reports to her - unheard of for the young lab tech who loved beeper tag as much as he did loud rock. Now she was staring at the results from the blood samples Greg had processed. She was glad she hadn't had this information when she was conversing with Mrs. Grissom. The story she had to tell Gil's mother was hard enough without having to tell her this.

"How's it going?"

Catherine looked up to find Doc Robbins standing near the end of the glass conference table. The Chief Medical Examiner for Clark County worked the night shift by choice, just as Grissom did. Both men preferred the autonomy that the graveyard shift provided. They may be administrators, but they were both men of science first. "Hey, Doc. Are you through for the night?" she asked the ME.

"I am, but I get the feeling you're not," Robbins told her, nodding at the open folder on the table. "Good news or bad news?"

She thought about that question for a second and then pushed the folder across the table toward him. "You tell me."

Robbins took a seat across from Catherine and slid his metal crutch under the table before pulling the file the rest of the way toward him and putting on his glasses. The folder contained several DNA reports that all identified the blood donor as Gil Grissom. Blood samples had come from the floor of his home, walls and railings from the building he lived in, and from a Toyota vehicle. The samples from the rear seat of the Toyota also contained nasal mucus and saliva. Grissom had been bleeding from a head wound that was most likely accompanied by some kind of facial trauma.

When he looked from the report and met Catherine's eyes he knew she understood completely how bad the implications from the report could be. There were other less horrific possibilities as well. "It could be a simple nose bleed," he offered.

"Yeah, it could be," she replied leaning back in her chair. "But it's probably not." She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"How do you know that?" Robbins challenged, not willing to jump to the worst possible conclusion immediately.

Catherine shook her head slightly and spread her arms. "If you had a beef with Grissom would you stop at giving him a bloody nose? I wouldn't."

He couldn't stop the grin that spread across his face. Grissom could have that effect on people. The man was not a people person. His compassion, real enough and seated deep in his character, found an outlet in becoming the voice of the victims he encountered. Watching Grissom piece together what had happened to a murder victim was a thing to behold. He could talk to the dead much more meaningfully than most people talked to the living.

Catherine wasn't dealing with this case as well as she'd like, that was obvious. Robbins could see the frustration and anger that lay just below the surface of her professional mask. "It must be difficult for you," Robbins told her.

That brought a hollow laugh from her. "It's nothing compared to what his mother must be going through," she said.

"You've contacted her then?"

"Yeah," she shook her head. "Before we knew how bad it was. I updated her this morning."

"How's she taking everything?" he wanted to know.

She looked back down at the file on the table. "Like Grissom would. She thanked me for all the hard work we're doing to find him." The burden of the situation was showing in her face. "God, Doc. I'm a mother and I didn't know what to tell her."

He looked her in the eye. "The truth."

She thought about that for a moment. "The truth is, things are going from bad to worse. Not exactly a message of hope."


	14. Chapter 14

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 14/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 08:43 AM

This work was best done with little more than a flashlight and a good pair of eyes. Nick and Warrick had decided to split up. Nick took the top of the stairwell while Warrick started at the bottom. They worked toward each other on hands and knees, one step at a time.

The waffle-patterned grooves of the metal steps managed to catch just about anything that could be scrapped off the bottom of a shoe. Nick had no difficulty collecting multiple samples of dirt and bits of asphalt or glass. It remained to be seen if anything that he found was similar to what Warrick collected in the suspect vehicle.

Warrick had the same problem. There was no shortage of dirt, soil, glass, plastic, and metal bits found. He knew he was looking for black glass and did find that. He also found green, clear and brown glass. He took samples of every kind of glass present.

"How's it going?" Warrick asked Nick as he moved up the stairs to the next landing. Nick was midway down the last flight of steps to be searched.

"Well, I did find some bits of dark glass," Nick told him. "We'll have to take it back to the lab to see if we're even in the ballpark, though."

Warrick nodded. "Yeah, I had the same problem." He looked up the stairwell. "Did you have a chance to check the hallway and entryway yet?"

Nick shook his head. "Not yet. I've still got this last bit."

"Got it. I guess I should start upstairs," Warrick suggested.

"Okay, partner," Nick nodded standing up and stretching his back. "I'll join you as soon as I'm done down here."

Warrick turned to head up the stairs.

"Hey, Warrick?" Nick waited for Warrick to look back at him. "You know, I can't help wondering what Gris would think about us doing what we're doing."

"What. You mean investigating his disappearance?" Warrick asked.

"No, man," Nick replied. "I mean combing through his life like we would a suspect's."

"What do you think he'd do if it were one of us?"

Nick shrugged. "This is different."

Warrick's forehead tensed. "Because it's Grissom? How does that make it different?"

Nick narrowed his gaze. "Are you trying to tell me that you don't feel … weird doing this?"

"No, I feel it too," Warrick admitted. He did feel it. Maybe too much. He hadn't thought about much else since the discussion with Sara, despite what he told her. "But worrying about it will only make us go gray."

Nick smirked a little. "Like we both haven't already added some of that to Grissom's head."

"Yeah, I know what you mean." Warrick always wondered why Gris hadn't fired him. Just the look of disappointment on his boss's face two years ago had been enough to make him wish Grissom had.

The look on his friend's face told Nick he had hit a sore spot that obviously hadn't healed. "Hey, man, I didn't mean…."

"Don't sweat it." Warrick said immediately. "I'm going to go up and get started on the entryway," he said, wanting to get away without offending.

Nick nodded and said no more. Warrick headed up the stairs. When he reached the front door of Grissom's house, he pulled a new pair of latex gloves out of his back pocket and donned them. Using his pocket knife, Warrick cut the Crime Lab seal and opened the door.

There was a quiet in the house that was a bit unnerving. Warrick had been here before. They all had. The dwelling gave the impression of a nineteenth-century academic. A mind more than a man seemed to lived here. A very active and interested mind.

Shaking himself out of his reverie, Warrick got down to business. He turned on his flashlight and kneeled down to inspect the concrete floor of the entryway. Working methodically, side to side, Warrick inched his way along the floor. There was precious little to find.

Warrick stopped when he reached the dried blood on the floor. Sitting back, he looked over at the briefcase, still lying on the floor. When he picked it up a file fell back to the floor, spilling its contents. Warrick picked up several pieces of paper and recognized them as office memorandums. He gathered them all up and started to put them back in the folder when he noticed the subject line of the memo on top. It read: Warrick Brown.

A quick perusal of the memo told him that Eckley was complaining again. Warrick had not gotten his Tahoe in for servicing on time. Going through several more memos he realized that Grissom had gotten complaints about lots of things: Greg's music in the DNA lab, Sara's "abuse" of overtime, sick calls, and general perceived lapses in administrative ability. Warrick guessed that Grissom received mountains of these kind of complaints, almost none of which he brought to the team. Grissom just handled things.

"It's true. The man does have to put up with a lot." Warrick said to himself.

"So do you." His head shot up to see Grissom standing next the bookcase, a lopsided grin on his face.

"What?" Warrick asked, unsure of what to say.

"Put up with a lot," Grissom said.

"Like what?"

Grissom cocked his head to the side. "Like unwarranted doubts."

"Not so unwarranted." Warrick insisted.

Grissom's smile reached his eyes at that. "You've kept your word. I'm proud of you."

"Wait until we find you. Then you can be proud." Warrick said, looking back at the paperwork in his hands. He realized he felt a little awkward.

When he looked up again, Grissom was gone.

Monday Morning 09:06 AM

Jim Brass found Sara and Catherine in the print lab. They were waiting for him.

"You look like hell," Catherine told Jim as he entered the room.

"Flattery will get you nowhere," he replied as he approached the lab counter. He opened the file he had brought with him and dropped it in front of them.

"What have you got?" Sara asked, already craning her neck to look at the information in the file.

Jim took a deep breath before beginning. "Paul Stankowski was convicted in 1979 of second degree murder in Los Angeles County California. He was sentenced to fifteen years under California Penal Code 190. He was released four months ago from Corcoran State Prison."

"Wait a minute," Catherine said, confused. "He was sentenced to fifteen years but did twenty-three. That doesn't add up."

"It does if you're a lowlife who likes to assault correctional officers," Jim said. "Our man, Paul, had another eight years tacked on for giggles and grins."

"I bet he wasn't giggling when they let him out," Sara remarked.

Catherine was still not sure about something. "Okay, he did the time in prison. What has this got to do with Grissom? Gil had to be, what, twenty-four when this guy was sent up?"

Jim nodded. "I was getting to that." He referred to the file he'd brought. "Gil Grissom was the youngest coroner in Los Angeles County history. According to his personnel file, he had started doing crime scene sweeps with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department as a part of a graduate fellowship program out of UCLA. Guess who found the body of the person Pauly was convicted of killing?"

Surprise flooded Sara's face. "You're kidding."


	15. Chapter 15

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 15/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 09:20 AM

As the morning light marched across the sides of his prison, he realized he was beginning to shiver from the cold. Only Gil knew the temperature of the air was rising, not falling. His fever was getting worse. The dehydration was becoming severe. It had progressed to the point that he didn't need to urinate anymore. His legs cramped occasionally and he was mildly nauseous almost continuously. His prison would soon be a coffin. Might as well call a spade a spade, Gil thought.

Okay, not as poetic as it could be, but an appropriate metaphor for Vegas. He would have laughed if he had had the energy.

Gil had been thinking about how he wound up in his current situation. He had been blindsided by events. Arcane circumstances had conspired to bring him to this point. Now, when his contribution seemed the greatest, he faced the real possibility that his last contribution would be the mystery of his death.

Finding the body of Chad Campbell had changed the way he looked at his life. He had always known that he would work with death. It didn't frighten him the way it seemed to frighten everyone else. Even as a boy he had found the process of death interesting. As soon as he was old enough, he had done the logical thing and become a coroner. Gil found out very early on that he could hear clearly what a dead body had to say. His mother called it a gift. She had even called him Sherlock Bones.

An attempt to laugh at the memory brought on a cramp in his side that doubled him over. He had to lie very still for several moments before he could breathe without pain. The nausea was so bad that it made his head pound. It was harder to see. The inside of his mouth was sore. He couldn't swallow, although he desperately wanted to.

What was he thinking about?

Sherlock Bones. That was it. He had been like Sherlock, fascinated by the puzzles that came with dying. Taking the police ride along that day had brought Gil face to face with the wonders of investigating a murder from a whole new perspective. He had found the body, but not only that: Gil had followed the case through to the end. Working with the medical examiner, Gil had collected the insects that had eventually established the timeline of the body's decomposition. This was the case that had birthed a passion for entomology in him.

It was also the first time Gil had testified in court. He could not remember ever feeling so intimidated as the day he initially took the oath and then took the witness stand. He testified as to how he had found the body, the condition the body had been in, the insects he had collected, and to the transfer of the body to the morgue. The Assistant District Attorney told him he was a natural on the stand because his had communicated his thoughts so clearly.

Gil had never considered himself vain, but if he had ever had an "Ah ha!" moment, then this had been it. He had been born to be a criminalist. Not just a criminalist, but a forensic entomologist. He spent the next six years becoming what he believed he was meant to be. He made a conscious effort to learn, expand, and hone his skills. The science was a means to that end. If he were to mourn the loss of anything, it would be the career. In reality, his career had become his life, and there was very little about that that he regretted.

Another cramp forced all thoughts of mourning out of his head.

Monday Morning 09:39 AM

Greg couldn't stand the wait any longer. He had paced around his lab for twenty minutes. There was work enough for him, true, but none of it would help find out where Grissom was. The action on that score was in Trace. He headed out of the DNA lab on a mission.

The comparative microscope captivated Larry's attention. He didn't hear Sanders' arrival. Consequently, he jumped at the sound of the foreign voice in his lab.

"Whatcha got there?" Greg asked, standing inches away from Larry.

"Jesus!" Larry half-shouted, leaping back several feet from the microscope.

Greg seized the moment and leaned in to take a look.

Larry stared at the younger lab tech, stunned by his ballsy nosiness. "Hey! That's my work there, Pancho."

"And fine work it is," Greg told Collins, adjusting the scope to suit his better vision. Larry was a bit near-sighted. What Greg could see were two almost identical pieces of what appeared to be siliceous rock crystals of some kind. "Hmmm," Greg continued, "interesting."

Larry grabbed Sanders' shoulder and pulled him away from the microscope. "What do you think you're doing here?" he said angrily. "Don't you have enough crap in the DNA lab to keep you busy?"

Refusing to be deterred, Greg scanned the counter next to the comparative microscope and found the Trace report for the specimen being examined. He picked it up and backed away from Collins.

"Elemental analysis of the sample found in front floorboard of suspect vehicle," Greg read aloud, "thirty-three point eight percent silica, seven point two percent aluminum …."

Collins yanked the report out of Greg's hands. "Get the hell out of my lab," Larry snarled. "I can handle the analysis myself."

Greg stood his ground. "You've been working on this stuff for two hours now."

Larry seethed. "What the hell difference is that to you?"

Now it was Greg's turn to be hot. "The difference is that Grissom's life is on the line. Did you give this preliminary analysis to Catherine or Warrick?"

Larry clenched his jaw. What the hell right did Grissom's pet have coming in here and telling him how to do his job? Larry had been doing his job in this lab for nearly twice as long as Sanders had been there. Everyone knew that Grissom liked Sanders. The shit this asshole could get away with infuriated Larry. This evidence was going to come from the Trace lab, not DNA. Larry wanted to be sure of his findings before making his report, that was all. This case was too important to him to take the chance of making a mistake.

Greg could see the red rising dangerously in Collins' face. He didn't care. This was too important. If Collins wasn't going to get this analysis done in short order, then Greg would. "I thought so," Greg spat. He turned on his heels and headed out the door. He was still on a mission.

Stocking down the corridor, Greg ran through the procedure in his head. Photograph, lift, document. He wasn't field trained. Not yet. But he had read the textbooks and the procedure manuals. This was something he could do. This was something he HAD to do. Time, she was a wastin'.

He arrived in the garage in short order and found everything he needed already there. Being careful to don gloves, Greg picked up a flashlight and opened the front driver's side door of the Toyota. It didn't take long to locate more of the dark siliceous rock grains he had seen under the comparative microscope. Greg grabbed the camera that was sitting on the workbench and checked to see if it had film. Pleased to find that it did, he focused on the grains of black glasslike material he had found and took a picture. He was about to set the camera down when it occurred to him that he should be safe and take another. That done, he set the exposed polaroids down side by side and labeled them with his name, the time and date, and the case number. He had committed the number to memory by simply typing it into the computer in the DNA lab so often.

All that remained for him to do was to tape-lift the sample. He did this and labeled the white edge of the tape the same way he had labeled the photos. Greg then removed his gloves, dropped them in an evidence bag and labeled it. He gathered up the photos, evidence bag, and sample and headed back to his lab.

The GC Mass Spec should be able to give him a quick rundown of the elemental composition of the sample he had collected. Greg had a hunch about this glass and if he was right, there might be a better way to find the needle in the haystack.


	16. Chapter 16

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 16/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 10:18 AM

Warrick pulled the Tahoe into a parking space in front of the Las Vegas Criminalistics building. Nick was opening the passenger side door to get out when his beeper went off. So did Warrick's. Both men looked at their messages.

"Pow wow," said Nick, placing his beeper back in its belt holster.

"Ditto," Warrick said, looking at his own page information.

Entering the building, the CSIs could sense that the mood inside the Crime Lab had changed. Something had happened. They looked at each other and picked up their pace, moving rapidly down the hall toward the evidence room.

They arrived to find Sara, Catherine, Jim Brass, and Greg waiting for them. The assembled group looked up as Nick and Warrick entered.

Nick set the evidence bag that held the samples they collected down on the table. He addressed Catherine. "What's up?"

Catherine got right down to it. "We know who the handprint belongs to," she told them.

This WAS news to Nick and Warrick.

"Who?" Warrick asked immediately.

Jim Brass spoke up. "Paul Stankowski from Moorpark, California. He was convicted in 1979 of second degree murder. Grissom testified at his trial."

Warrick and Nick looked at each other in surprise. This was a solid piece of information. Nick knew this was good news but approached it with cautious optimism. Knowing who a suspected attacker was didn't immediately help them find Grissom. "Do we know where this guy is?"

Jim shook his head. "We have a detail trying to determine Mr. Stankowski's whereabouts right now."

"We do know that he drove the Toyota," Sara offered. "Prints on the steering wheel and door handles match the handprint from Grissom's front door."

"There's more," Jim continued. "Arizona State Police report finding an abandoned vehicle at a rest stop outside Riordan. Turns out the vehicle was stolen. The vehicle was registered in California. Prints in the car match our suspect."

Warrick mind was racing. "Riordan. That's on I-40."

Jim nodded. "Just outside Flagstaff."

"Where the Toyota was stolen from," Sara said.

Nick was putting it together. "So our suspect steals a car in California and drives to Arizona where he dumps it. He steals new wheels in Flagstaff and comes to Vegas to hunt down Gris."

"Who," Sara pickup up the ball, "he attacks and transports in the back of the stolen Toyota to … where?"

Greg Sanders nervously fidgeted with the report he held. "The blood and hairs Nick found in the backseat of the Toyota belong to Grissom. There's no doubt he was in the car."

This wasn't new information for Nick but he swallowed hard at hearing it anyway. "What about the bits of glass on the driver's floorboard?"

Greg nodded at the file he held. "Yeah, it turns out it's not glass but a siliceous crystal called perlite."

"Perlite?" Brass asked. "Is that helpful?"

Nick ignored the question for the moment. A bell was ringing dully in his memory. "Can I see that report, Greg?" He took the file Greg offered him. "Thanks, man."

"Wasn't Trace working on those samples?" Warrick asked Greg.

Greg shrugged his shoulders. "It was taking too long, so I decided to lend a hand."

After a quick scan of the file, Nick began to tap the report and answered the question. "I think that this can lead us somewhere helpful."

"Really?" Greg asked, surprised.

Catherine could see the wheels turning inside Nick's head. "What do you know that we don't know, Nick?"

Nick looked up from the report. "I'm not sure. Let me do some checking." With his head buried in the report again, he headed out of the room.

Catherine followed Nick out of the room with her eyes before turning back to the others still in the room. "Okay, what do we have that's outstanding?"

"I've got the court records from Stankowski's trial coming from California. I've also put through a request for the case notes from the LA County Coroner's office. I'll go through everything when it arrives. Should be anytime," Sara said. "They put a rush on it."

"I've got some shoe leather to burn," Jim told Catherine.

"Do you think this creep is still in Vegas?" Greg asked the detective.

Jim put his hands in his pockets. "What I think doesn't matter. My experience tells me that this guy isn't going anywhere until he's sure he's finished what he came here for. Whether or not he's done that …." He shrugged and left the thought unfinished. Jim nodded to Catherine and headed out the door as well. There was a lot of ground to cover in the search for their suspect.

Warrick pointed to the brown bag filled with the samples he and Nick had collected in the stairwell of Grissom's building. "I've got this to go through as well. It may be nothing, but if any of this stuff turns out to be …."

"Perlite," Greg added.

"Yeah, perlite," Warrick picked up again, "then whatever Nick's got cooking might prove to be a real break for us."

Catherine nodded. "Okay. I think it's time to update the Sheriff again. I'll give you a hand when I get back."

"Thanks," Warrick said. Everyone headed their separate directions. The clock was still ticking and everyone knew that with the time went the possibility for a good outcome to the case.

Monday Morning 10:38 AM

The Crime Lab reference library was extensive and included texts on just about every scientific discipline, manuals on field techniques and laboratory procedures, and several forensic journal series. It wasn't hard to locate a text on geology.

Finding what he was looking for took a little research. Once Nick did unearth the information he needed, he compared that to the report Greg had given him.

The report contained the elemental breakdown of a sample from the Toyota:

ELEMENTIAL ANALYSIS (PERLITE, CRUDE)

Silicon 33.8

Aluminum 7.2

Potassium 3.5

Sodium 3.4

Iron 0.6

Calcium 0.6

Magnesium 0.2

Trace 0.2

Oxygen (by difference)47.5

Net Total97.0

Bound Water 3.0

Total100

"Crude perlite, huh," Nick said to himself. What he found confirmed his hunch. Now all he needed to do was discover if his hunch led him closer to Grissom.

Nick dropped his pen in the crease of the open book in front of him and rubbed his eyes. He felt hungry and tired. The next order of business should be some sort of food. He'd think better.

Almost immediately he felt guilty about that. When was the last time Grissom ate anything? Could he even eat?

"Damn," Nick whispered.

"You're right."

Nick looked up and found Grissom standing on the other side of the table. His arms were crossed and his face held that knowing smile that Nick was so used to seeing.

"About what?" Nick asked his boss.

"You'd think better if you had something to eat," Grissom told him.

Nick swallowed hard. "I've got to try and figure this out." He glanced back down at the book. "It could be nothing but …."

"You're good at your job, Nick," Grissom said softly. "Trust your instincts."

Surprised, Nick's head snapped up. Grissom was gone.


	17. Chapter 17

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 17/26)

by Cheers

Monday Morning 10:55 AM

"We're working on both areas," Catherine was telling the Sheriff on the phone. "The fingerprints led us to identify Stankowski. If the mineral analysis can identify a unique location, we'll have somewhere to begin a search."

"Then I hope this lead is a solid one," the Sheriff's voice told her. "I've put every available man on this, Catherine. Everyone wants to find Gil."

For once, she thought, the Sheriff sounded completely sincere. He and Gil may have had their differences, but no one would dispute the value Gil held for the department. "We appreciate the support, Brian."

"He's one of our own," Mobley said.

"Yeah," Catherine replied, unable to keep the fatigue out of her voice. "I'll call you when we have anything more concrete."

"Thank you, Catherine."

They hung up.

Catherine sat back in his chair. She had called from Gil's office. The closed door gave her a modicum of privacy. When Gil was there he almost never closed his door. He wanted people to be able to find him, to talk to him, to ask questions if they had them. She chided him often for his lack of people skills, but there was a bit of dishonesty in that. Gil did have people skills. He was a natural teacher. He imparted information with just about every breath. What he couldn't do well was judge his effect on the people around him.

She was sure that Grissom had no idea how much his absence from CSI, even for this short period of time, had affected the entire unit. No cake in the break room my ass, she thought.

The building suffered from a hushed tension. Larry in Trace was furious with Greg. Something about territory. Damn. She had sent Larry off to finish with the comparison analysis Warrick had sent him. Greg she decided to leave alone. Greg's issue had nothing to do with territory. He, like she, wanted to find Grissom as soon as humanly possible. As much as Catherine wished everyone at the lab felt that Grissom's case should be a priority, she knew that there were those there who didn't feel so warmly toward their supervisor. Grissom could be a hard-ass when the situation warranted it. While he was usually soft-spoken - a trait that led some to erroneously believe he didn't care – Gil could get angry. Rarely, but he could.

So could she. She, on the other hand, was not so adept at keeping her emotions segregated from the work. Catherine had always admired Gil's ability to step away from what he felt and just do the job. In turn, Gil admired her ability to live with the decisions she made in her life. He would regret a poorly made decision for a long time. That's why he made so few, she supposed.

As much as Catherine would love to advance on the job, she knew that Gil was better qualified to run the unit. They weren't alike, and the way they would face a problem was very different, but what Gil was able to accomplish with the tools at the lab bordered on brilliance. Catherine still had a lot to learn from him.

Okay, she told herself, that was bullshit. She fought the emotion that advanced on her. She didn't want to be deal with how she felt right now. There was too much to do. The truth was she didn't know exactly what she felt. Catherine simply wasn't ready for Gil to be gone from her life. She wanted to yell at him when he was thoughtless, to lean on him when she was unsure, to see his face every day when she felt overwhelmed, and to know that he would just be there. His steadiness had been something that, up to now, she had taken for granted. Nothing about her life had been very steady. Gil had always been that way. She had used that fact to berate him when she was angered, but if she were going to be honest it was the thing about her friend that she valued the most.

"Where the hell are you?" she asked his empty office. Before her emotion could completely take control she rose and escaped out the door. She had promised to help Warrick in Evidence. At least in there, she could leave behind her thoughts about life with Gil Grissom for a little while.

Monday Morning 11:22 AM

Warrick had managed to match the perlite crystals from the Toyota to three samples collected from the lower sections of the stairwell in Grissom's building. The implication was that the suspect had entered the building from the back. How he had done that without a key to the door or without prying the door open was unclear. He could have arrived earlier, exited the door and propped it open, then reentered when Grissom came home.

Catherine had gone through all the samples, identified possible matches for closer inspection, and sent the rest for simple elemental analysis to Trace. They worked in near silence.

When Catherine had arrived to help him, Warrick had asked her how she was doing. She hadn't met his eyes and gave a noncommittal answer. Warrick hadn't been able to decide immediately whether to push the issue or give her some space. When she wasted no time before diving into the work, he chose to leave it alone for now. He kept an eye on her, though.

She had known Gris longer than any of them. Their friendship gave her a latitude with the boss that none of the rest of them enjoyed. Catherine had to be feeling it, maybe more than the rest of them were. What Warrick didn't know was if she was dealing with it well. Maybe it wasn't his place to know.

Nick's arrival interrupted the quiet. He slowed his pace as he entered the room and glanced around. "Is everything okay in here?"

Catherine looked up from the samples she was examining. "Fine. Do you have anything?"

Nick narrowed his gaze for a moment. If he didn't miss his guess, Catherine was anything but fine. "Cath, are you okay?"

She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. Nick was just concerned about her, she knew that. But she didn't want to discuss how she felt. Trying not to sound as exasperated as she felt, she repeated, "I'm fine."

The look on Nick's face told her that he didn't believe her. Warrick saved her from losing her temper.

"What did you find out about the perlite?" Warrick asked.

Nick kept his gaze on Catherine for another second. He finally looked at the file he carried and answered Warrick's question. "I think we have a place to start."

Warrick's eyebrows shot up. "No joke?"

Moving the rest of the way into the room, Nick put the file down on the table. "Perlite is a form of volcanic glass. The ore we found is the crude crushed variety. The processed form of perlite is used in all kinds of products. What we found is unprocessed."

"Unprocessed?" Catherine asked.

"Yeah," Nick continued. "The ore or crude perlite is mined in pits. Then it's crushed for processing. When the crushed crystals are heated to above sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit the bound water expands, causing the crystal to pop like popcorn. What you get after cooling is a strong lightweight material that holds water and air well. Processed perlite is used in construction, horticulture, and in industrial concrete and plastics."

Warrick shrugged. "So what's so special about what we found?"

"I'm getting to that." Nick picked up a sample of the crushed crude perlite. "These small bits of crushed perlite are not natural. They're also not processed. So that means that they were mined and then prepared for processing."

Now Warrick was catching on. "So this form doesn't occur naturally in the soil."

Nick was nodding. "That's right."

Catherine understood where he was going. "If we knew where the perlite was processed, we might find where our suspect has been."

"And if the suspect was at the processing site, there might be a chance Grissom was there." Warrick concluded.

"Exactly," Nick grinned. "I did some checking with the Nevada State Mining Commission. There is only one perlite processing center within fifty miles of Vegas and only three within a hundred miles. They faxed me a list."

"I'll call Brass," Catherine said.

"Already done," Nick told her. "Ten minutes ago."

She smiled. "Get Sara," she told him. "Let's go."


	18. Chapter 18

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 18/26)

by Cheers

Monday Afternoon 12:57 PM

It was obvious from the neglected state of the building that this ore processing plant had not been in use for quite some time. The windows were dusted over from countless wind storms, common in the high desert. One of every four or five windows was cracked or broken. The sliding metal entry door was rusted open, and the concrete bricks from which the building had been constructed had long ago lost any paint they sported to the blowing sands of Southern Nevada.

A black Tahoe, a State Police cruiser, and an unmarked LVMPD Ford Taurus pulled up outside the sagging chain link fence that surrounded an ancient paved parking lot. Most of the area had degraded to dust, and the parking lot outside the building complex seemed more sand and scrub brush than asphalt.

There was very little life in Goodsprings, Nevada. The town had sprung up in the middle of the desert to serve the mining industry that had once flourished here.

There had been a railroad spur built to service the local mine rail traffic. When the mines closed, the service spur had gone quiet and weeds had grown over the tracks. The town itself had dried up under the hot Nevada sun. Today, only a handful of diehard residents remained to hold off extinction.

The processing plant lay three miles outside of Goodsprings, just east of the abandoned railroad spur. According to the information Nick had obtained from the State Mining Commission, this plant was still the property of the Crystal Gorge Mine Company. The owners of the company had readily given permission to search the property. Cooperation with local authorities went a long way in preventing unnecessary reclamation ordinance hassles.

Four criminalists from Las Vegas exited the vehicles, accompanied by Sergeant O'Riley and Trooper Blair. Everyone wore sunglasses – combat gear to ward off the brightness of the relentless midday high desert sun. There was no sign of life about either the building complex or the surrounding property except for the call of a faraway crow.

"How do you want to play it?" Warrick asked Catherine.

She looked around and made some quick decisions. "Divide and conquer," she told the team. "Nick and I will take the main entrance. Sara, see if there's anything around back. There must be another way into the building complex."

Sara nodded. "You got it."

"Warrick," Catherine continued, "find out if there are any signs our Toyota or some other vehicle was in this parking lot recently."

Warrick looked over his shoulder. "Roger that."

Turning to the two police officers present, Catherine asked rather than instructed. "Would you fellows mind helping with a search of the grounds?"

"My pleasure," Trooper Blair responded. It wasn't more than eighty-five degrees out – a balmy fall day for this area of Nevada. Besides, when a member of law enforcement was in trouble, there should be no need for asking. Help was given whenever and wherever it could do some good, no questions asked.

"No problem," O'Riley said, grateful for something, anything, to do that might lead to Grissom.

Catherine briefly touched O'Riley's arm. "Thanks." She looked at the rest of the team and nodded toward the processing plant. "Let's get to it."

With field kits or flashlights, they all fanned out to begin searching for Gil Grissom outside the ghost town of Goodsprings, Nevada.

Monday Afternoon 01:11 PM

His shift had long since ended. He should have gone home and gone to bed. He should have, but that wasn't where he was. Instead, Greg found himself watching Grissom's tarantula slowly make its way across the bottom of its glass home.

Larry had gone home and Denise was now working in Trace. That meant that Greg didn't have to tiptoe around the lab in an attempt to stay out of Larry's crosshairs. The rest of the night shift team was either out in the field or had gone home. Greg figured that if he hung around the lab he'd be likely to find out information faster.

The rumor mill in the lab was faster than any official channel known to man. Information could be transferred so quickly in the lab that it seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. That's how it had been when Holly Gribbs was shot and Brass was removed as head of the lab. Just about everyone in the lab knew that Grissom was going to be the new boss before Grissom knew it.

Now the rumor mill had very little to speculate about. Grissom would be found either dead or alive. Or he might not be found at all. And, in true Vegas style, odds makers were taking bets. That thought made Greg's stomach turn. Greg loved all things fun and light-hearted, but making book on the outcome of this situation seemed cruel. The boss had to have family somewhere. Greg had heard that Catherine was calling Grissom's mother to give her updates. What would Grissom's mom think if she knew people were wagering on the case's outcome? God, that was sick.

The tarantula had settled at the far end of the terrarium. He was full from a day of eating and oblivious to the circumstances of his owner.

"Probably just as well," Greg said to the spider.

"He thanks you."

Greg whirled around to find Grissom standing in the doorway to his office.

"I was just making sure he was okay," Greg explained.

"And he thanks you for it," Grissom said. "So do I."

Greg thrust his hands into his pockets. "I just figured someone had to until … you know."

"Yeah," Grissom said gently, "I know."

"I won't let anything happen to him," Greg continued nervously. "He'll be safe and sound when you get back."

Grissom smiled warmly at the lab tech. "I appreciate that, Greg. You have a good heart. It's what will make you a good criminalist someday."

"Really?" Greg asked, surprised. He looked back at the tarantula, too embarrassed to meet Grissom's eyes. Turning back, he found that the doorway was empty. The boss was gone.

Monday Afternoon 01:25 PM

Jim Brass met Patrolman Wyatt in front of the reception desk at Arizona Charlie's. The off-strip hotel and casino was a favorite for locals needing a getaway. Located on Decatur Boulevard west of the strip, Arizona Charlie's boasted a large full featured casino, cheap rooms, and abundant inexpensive food options. It also had the advantage of being slightly out of the way while being on a major bus route. The casino was exactly thirty-five cents from the center of all the action.

"What have we got?" Jim asked Wyatt.

Officer Wyatt handed Jim a copy of a registration form. "Hotel security gave me this. A Paul Stankowski registered here three days ago, room 471. He prepaid for his room in cash."

"How many days?" Brass inquired.

"Five," Wyatt answered.

"Did you check the room yet?"

Wyatt shook his head. "I was told to wait for you, Captain."

Brass looked up from the registration form. "Okay. Let's see if Mr. Stankowski is in."


	19. Chapter 19

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 19/26)

by Cheers

Monday Afternoon 01:32 PM

Jim Brass had his gun in his right hand and his back to the wall next to the door of room 471. With a silent nod to Officer Wyatt, who also had his gun drawn and was standing on the other side of the door, Jim began to pound with his fist.

"Mr. Stankowski?" Brass yelled. "Police! Open the door!"

There was silence on the other side. Brass listened for a few more seconds and then relaxed a little. He turned to the hotel security guy who had accompanied them and said, "Okay, open it."

Using an electronic pass key, the security guard opened the door and stepped back quickly. Jim entered the room with his gun held out in front of him. Together, he and Wyatt made a thorough sweep of the small hotel room and bath before holstering their weapons.

Jim called to the security guard, who moved into the room. "Can you get me the maid who works this floor today?"

"Sure," the young man said and then began to speak into his walkie talkie as he stepped back out into the hallway.

Brass did a cursory visual scan of the room. A gym bag lay half open on the folding luggage rack, and the notepad next to the phone had several pages torn off of it. It looked as if the maid had already serviced the room for the day. Either that or their suspect hadn't been there in a while.

Jim turned to Wyatt. "Call it in and get forensics here. I want someone watching this room every second until this guy shows up again."

With a "Yes, Sir," Wyatt moved off to notify dispatch.

The security guard returned with a middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a maid's uniform. "Captain, this is Rosa Domingez," he introduced her. "She's working this floor today."

"Thanks," Jim said, turning his attention to the maid. "Rosa?"

"Si," she replied.

Jim came to the point. "Did you clean in here today?"

Rosa nodded. "Si. An hour ago. Why? What is wrong?"

"Nothing," Jim assured her. "I just want to know if the room looked lived in. Do you think the guest who has this room was here last night? Did you see anyone in here today at all?"

She looked past the Captain at the room beyond as if trying to jog her memory. She must clean fifty rooms a day. He couldn't expect her to remember every guest who stayed at the hotel. Her eyes lit up upon seeing the gym bag. "Si, I remember. The bed was messy and the shower was wet. I did not see a man. He was not here when I knocked. I just cleaned and left."

"But you know the guest in the room is a man?" Jim asked.

Rosa gave him a rather motherly look. "Women are not so messy as men. They don't leave the sink full of beard."

That made Jim smile. Men are pigs, no doubt about that. "Thank you, Rosa."

The maid left, and Officer Wyatt moved towards him. "A forensic team is on the way, and dispatch is sending another cruiser."

"Right," Brass said. "Now all we have to do is hope he comes back."

Monday Afternoon 02:21 PM

Sara had found no evidence that anything except the occasional nocturnal animal had been at the back of the building. There was no indication that anyone had gone through the back door of the processing center complex in months, perhaps years. It was locked. She had followed the edge of the building around the other side before entering through the same broken door Nick and Catherine had used.

Together, the three CSIs had combed the main floor and then the second floor of the office portion of the building. Nick had taken a precarious walk across the catwalks that were mounted above the main floor of the plant. At one time large heating ovens and crushing machines had sat on the concrete floors of the plant's large interior. Now, the main building was nothing more than an empty husk.

They met up at the open doorway and looked back out at the sun-baked parking lot where Warrick was finishing up. "Anything?" Catherine asked Nick.

"No," he sighed, placing his hands on his hips. "No one's been up there for a while. That's not a bad thing, either. That catwalk is a bit rickety."

"Good thing you're a lightweight," Sara kidded.

Nick gave her a sidelong look. "Look who's talking, toothpick." Then to Catherine, "Seriously, it'd be real easy to get hurt in here."

Catherine shrugged. "There'd be a hue and cry from the community to protect the kids if there WAS a community around here. Right now all anyone needs to worry about getting in here are the jackrabbits and rattlesnakes."

"Rattlesnakes?" Sara looking around nervously.

Nick grinned. "They just love a cool place to snooze after a hot day of hunting. This building would be a perfect place for it."

Just as Sara was about to retort, Warrick joined them. "I found two sets of tire tracks that look pretty fresh. Both enter at the main gate." He pointed out to the opening in the fence at the access road and then gestured toward the north end of the building to their left. "They go to the end of the building complex and back out again. I'm pretty sure it's the same car." He looked back at the group. "I made four molds for comparison with the Toyota. Should be able to tell more when we get back. What about in here?"

"Struck out," Nick said.

"What's on the north end of the building?" Catherine asked.

Sara looked at her notes. "There's an old gas pump and what looks like the remains of an old crane of some kind. I took some pictures."

Catherine headed out of the door and walked around that end of the building. They all followed her.

They found the old gas pump, the rubber hose now gone and the glass facing broken on both sides. The tire tracks that Warrick mentioned disappeared as the ground down asphalt/dirt turned into a concrete drive path along both sides of the pump. Whoever had driven up here had not backed the vehicle out put had pulled through and made a wide turn to the left before pulling back in front of the building. Catherine followed the tire track paths on foot until she came back to the pump station again.

Nick had discovered something interesting under a large metal support post. "I think I found something," he said to no one in particular.

What he had found was what looked like a long low pile of crushed black glass - perlite. Beyond the crushed unprocessed ore, there was a dried dirt puddle next to the metal post.

"Probably urine," Catherine said matter-of-factly.

"Yeah," Nick said, "and to use this post as an outhouse he had to stand on this pile of perlite."

"Transfer," Sara agreed. She placed several small pieces of the crushed black rock from the low pile on the ground in a bindle and labeled it.

"I'll take a sample from the dirt here. We might get lucky." Nick offered.

"Urethral cells?" Warrick asked.

Nick looked at him. "Maybe."

Approaching footsteps heralded the arrival of the two police officers. "We didn't find anything," O'Riley said. "Just a bunch of scrub brush and rocks." He looked at Nick, who was collecting the soil sample. "Did you do any better?"

"Tire treads and urine," Catherine informed him.

"Bathroom stop?" Trooper Blair wondered aloud.

"Possibly. Could be nothing," Catherine said. "Could be our guy. The bits of rock we found at Grissom's suggest that this could be where our suspect stopped."

"But he didn't bring Grissom back here," O'Riley said.

"Doesn't look that way," she agreed.

"Where does that leave us?" O'Riley asked.

Catherine sighed and looked out at the desert that surrounded them on all sides. "With another very small piece of the puzzle and the clock still ticking."


	20. Chapter 20

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 20/26)

by Cheers

Monday Afternoon 02:30 PM

He must be having auditory hallucinations, a sure sign the dehydration was becoming severe. Early delirium. Damn. Gil could not explain it any other way to himself. He was hearing voices. And not just any voices either. He would swear he had heard Catherine, Sara, Nick, and Warrick. He even thought he had heard Ray O'Riley and another man who he thought could have been Jim Brass. He heard cars also – the crunch of tires on gravel.

Hope had built in him and his heart had pounded in his chest the first time he thought he heard them. Gil had stopped believing anyone would reach him in time. As the day had wore on he could feel that his body was losing the battle. Then the sounds reached him, or he thought they did. He had wanted to shout but his voice had long since gone, his tongue a sore swollen mass in a dry mouth. He had tried to use the sling but lacked sufficient strength.

The sounds of familiar voices taunted him in his fatigue, coming and going in snatches over the past few hours. Then, just a few minutes ago Gil had heard the sound of vehicles again. Now all was quiet.

Cruel hope faded as he finally realized that he probably hadn't really heard anything. Dehydration was now causing his mind to play tricks on him. This was the final battle he would wage. The loss of a rational mind, even above ultimate death, frightened him. A line from Hamlet leapt to his tired mind.

Poor Ophelia,

Divided from herself and her fair judgment

Lying on his side, trying to conserve as much energy as he could, Gil found himself fighting to stay lucid. If death was coming, let it find him aware.

Monday Afternoon 02:51 PM

Local Las Vegas Channel 3 news didn't mention the story during the noon newscast. He had watched the whole thing on the television above the bar at Shooters. The teaser for the evening news that ran just now mentioned 'a missing law enforcement employee' – missing, not dead.

Paul frowned. With any luck, the cops might never find Grissom. He had come a long way to do this guy. He wanted the bastard dead but wanted his death to be slow. In retrospect, perhaps a simple bullet to the chest would have been better.

Yes, he thought, to the chest, not the head. Paul wanted Grissom to know he was dying. As it was, Grissom must know he was a dead man - or he was already dead. Paul figured that was good enough. Time in the joint had taught him patience if nothing else. It had certainly given him time enough to think about the whole thing.

Sandy had been raised in Jean, Nevada. He was Paul's last cellmate before Paul got out. Sandy was the one who told Paul about the abandoned mineshafts that dotted the desert out here by the score. Though not an aqueduct access shaft, a mineshaft was close. The abandoned pit was easy enough to find once that old plant was located. Someone just had to know where to look. Sandy's description of the area had been perfect even after ten years of being in the joint.

It was nearly three o'clock now and there was no more mention of the missing law enforcement employee on TV. He was a bit tired after spending much of last night and this morning at the craps table. Luck had not deserted Paul since he had left his dump in Fresno and headed to Vegas. With several hundred extra dollars cash in his pockets, he decided to take a nap. He'd watch the evening newscast in his hotel room and then head downtown.

Tossing a tip onto the bar and downing the last of his beer, Paul rose to go back to his room at the casino across the street.

The walk had taken only a few minutes, and he was soon entering the spacious main casino floor. Musical notes played by myriad slot machines and the steady buzz of excitement, anger, and laughter told Paul that the locals who loved to hang out here were having a good time despite the fact that it was Monday.

Of course, he thought, when you're in the joint, Monday is just like every other day. He made the turn away from the casino and into the hallway leading to the hotel elevators. The security guard at a small podium in front of the elevators asked to see his hotel door key card. Damned Bin Laden and those bastard hijackers had created such a furor that the security conscious public made it harder to get just about anything done. The world outside prison was a much different place than it had been when he was sent up.

Boarding the elevator, one thing struck him as funny. Elevator music was still as bad as it had ever been. The short ride ended as the doors slid open on the fourth floor. Paul headed down the hallway toward his room. He didn't recognize the short guy in the gray suit that rounded the corner and was moving along the hallway just a few steps behind him. Probably a local business man getting his dick tickled after lunch.

He stopped at the door to his hotel room to put his key card into the lock. He didn't get the door open before the guy spoke to him.

"Paul Stankowski?"

His gun was tucked into the back of his jeans were he always carried it and was well hidden by his jacket. He reached toward it as he turned to face the man. Only a cop would know who the hell he was.

The business man did turn out to be a cop, and he was a tricky bastard to boot. The cop's piece was already in his hands and was leveled at Paul's face. "Don't!" the suit told him.

Looking at the cop's face, Paul knew it was possible for this guy to blow him away. You can always tell who has the balls for killing and who doesn't. It was all in the eyes. This cop could pull the trigger without a second thought.

Within seconds cops had materialized out of every nook and cranny in that hallway and Paul was surrounded. He had paused with his hand halfway to the goal and was trying to decide what his odds of getting a single shot off were.

"Don't make me tell you twice," the cop in the suit told him. His face darkened and Paul knew that he was pushing the wrong buttons with this guy.

Paul lowered his hand back to his side and asked an obvious question. "How do you know who I am?"

The cop's eyes narrowed as he said, "It's my job to know the scum who come to my town."

Scum. Paul guessed he had always been thought of as scum by cops. He had learned to hate them all when he was young, and his opinion of them hadn't improved. As the cops behind him took hold of his arms, he felt one of them find his gun and yank it out of its hiding place. An ex-con with an unregistered gun was an ex-con in jail. Shit.

"What the fuck do you want with me?" he shot back to the suit.

Jim Brass put his gun back in the holster on this belt and looked back at Stankowski. "You're going to do me a favor, Paul."

"Like hell I am," Paul practically snarled.

"Oh, you are," Brass told him coldly, with no attempt to hide the anger in his eyes. "You're going to tell me where Gil Grissom is."

Monday Afternoon 03:12 PM

After a brief discussion about the merits of splitting up, the team had decided to do just that. Currently, Nick and Warrick were on their way to the second perlite processing center on Nick's list. This one was just forty-two miles from Goodsprings. Sara and Catherine took the samples collected in Goodsprings back with them to the lab. They hitched a ride with O'Riley and would arrive back in Vegas in another fifteen minutes, traffic allowing.

Sara had spent the drive time looking over the case file she had received from California. She had called the office and found out that the coroner's notes from the Campbell case had been received. Sara hoped there was something in the notes to suggest what Stankowski might have done with Grissom. Assuming, she thought, that Stankowski hadn't just killed Grissom as soon as he had gotten him out of town.

O'Riley had informed them that the search of the area around where the Toyota had been found off Blue Diamond Road had turned up nothing. There was no sign that Grissom or his body had been dumped within ten miles of the site. What Blue Diamond Road had offered to whoever dumped the car was easy access to transportation back into Vegas. There were two gas stations and a casino within five miles of the dump site. A bit of a hike but not too bad. Plus, with increasing traffic along that stretch of Highway 160 from Nye County, the guy could easily have caught a ride into town.

She sighed and turned her attention to the increasing signs of civilization passing her rear seat window as they neared Las Vegas. Up in the front seat, Catherine's cellphone was ringing.

"Willows," Catherine spoke into her phone.

She listened for several seconds with only an "All right." and a "You got it." Sara hoped something good was happening somewhere. Her heart was telling her that they were very short on time. Grissom needed a real break and very soon. They all did.

When Catherine hung up, she turned in her seat so she could look at both Sara and O'Riley. She came right to it. "That was Brass," she told them. "They've found Paul Stankowski."


	21. Chapter 21

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 21/26)

by Cheers

Monday Afternoon 03:43 PM

Sara stood with her arms crossed and her jaw clenched, looking through the one-way glass into the interrogation room. She had wanted to see the man, to look at his face. Catherine had joined Brass at the table. O'Riley stood with his back to the door. Paul Stankowski slouched in a chair, drawing invisible designs on the tabletop and ignoring the questions Brass was asking.

"We have your prints in two stolen vehicles and on the front door of Gil Grissom's house," Brass told Stankowski. "You want to tell me how they got there?"

Stankowski switched the digit he was using to draw on the tabletop from his index finger to his middle finger. The gesture wasn't lost on Jim or Catherine.

"Miss Sidle."

Sara turned to find that the Sheriff had joined her in the observation room. He was holding a file folder. "Sheriff," she said.

"I brought the file from the Los Angeles Coroner's office. I thought you might want to see it as soon as you got back," Mobley offered her the file.

She frowned slightly. The Sheriff seemed an unlikely delivery person, but she wasn't about to tell him that. "I do. Thanks," she said taking the file from him.

"So this is Mr. Stankowski?" the Sheriff asked.

"That's him," she replied.

Inside the interrogation room, very little progress was being made. "We have enough to convict you of felony assault, grand theft auto in two states, possession of an illegal weapon, and possibly murder," Jim Brass was informing Stankowski. "I guess you really missed prison, huh."

"Fuck you," Stankowski muttered.

"I hope you find what you need in those notes," Mobley told Sara. "I don't think Mr. Stankowski is going to be at all helpful to our investigation."

He looked at the young CSI and saw the anger and fear on her face. This was what being involved with the criminal element was like. The information needed to solve crimes was often held by those who were least willing to offer it. The challenge had always been to be smarter than the bad guys. Sometimes smart wasn't enough. Sometimes there was no substitute for luck. If Grissom were in the room with them, he would probably argue about that. Brian suspected that Gil didn't believe in luck. Right now, staring at the face of the man who was probably responsible for killing Grissom, Brian prayed that he was wrong. Luck might be all they had left unless the information in the file he had just given Sara was pure gold.

Sara inspected the face of the Sheriff closely. She was sure there was a genuine sadness there. Maybe even regret. She guessed there were a lot of people feeling that way right about now. Sometimes it takes missing someone to realize how they've impacted your life. And Grissom was missing. Not dead, Sara told herself. He can't be. She couldn't think that.

She took a deep breath and looked back down at the file. "I'll let you know," she told the Sheriff and headed toward the conference room. With luck, Grissom would be able to tell them what Stankowski wouldn't. Grissom just might be the only one with the clue to where he could be found.

Monday Evening 04:09 PM

The Cal Neri Mining Company just outside Searchlight, Nevada was still in business, but on a very small scale. Their processing plant was efficiently run and employed a single shift year round. Sometimes, during the summer months, they ran two shifts. Warrick and Nick had no problem with the plant manager when they asked to take a look around the small building complex. They were joined by another State Trooper, Steve Allan. This complex was smaller and more streamlined than the Crystal Gorge Mine Company had been.

No one who worked at the plant remembered seeing the Toyota or an unfamiliar face in the past week. For that matter, no one could remember seeing anyone unusual in months. Searchlight wasn't exactly a tourist destination.

A search of the grounds around the plant building yielded them nothing. There was no indication that anyone who didn't belong at the plant had been there. The fence surrounding the complex was in good repair. The security guard on duty searched the logs for the past two weeks for any indications of the unusual. As far as the company's records were concerned, nothing untoward had happened.

Nick had thanked the plant manager and joined Warrick and Trooper Allan at their vehicles. "Well this was a strike out," he said.

Warrick shook his head. "Not entirely. At least we can be reasonably sure Stankowski wasn't here."

Nick took a deep breath and nodded. Damn, he was tired. This had been one long-ass day and there didn't seem to be an end in sight. "Yeah," he said as he pulled out the list the State Mining Commission had faxed to him. "That leaves us with one more processing plant within a hundred miles of Vegas."

"Where's that?" Trooper Allan asked.

Nick consulted the list. "Panaca."

Warrick whistled. "Man, that's got to be eighty, ninety miles from here."

"More like a hundred," Allan told them. "That's way outside my patrol area. I'll try to find out who's patrolling out there this afternoon."

"Hey, thanks man," Nick said as the Trooper moved off to place the call to dispatch.

Warrick turned to his partner. "I think you'd better drive."

It was Nick's turn to shake his head. "I was about to say the same thing to you. "

Before they resorted to a game of rock-paper-scissors to determine which of them would drive, Nick's cellphone rang.

Monday Evening 04:53 PM

Sara tapped the eraser of a pencil impatiently on the pad of paper she had been taking notes on. She listened as Nick's cellphone rang a second time.

"Stokes."

"Nick, Sara," she began. "Where are you guys?"

"Just finishing up in Searchlight," Nick's voice said. "We were thinking about heading up to Panaca. That's where the last processing plant on the list is located."

"You better put off that trip," Sara told him. "Catherine wants you both back here ASAP."

"What's up?"

"Well, Stankowski isn't talking but Grissom might be."


	22. Chapter 22

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 22/26)

by Cheers

Monday Evening 06:22 PM

The conference room table was practically filled to capacity with Chinese take-out, coffee cups, soda cans, and paperwork. Arrayed around the table were six employees of the Las Vegas Police Department, all in varying degrees of exhaustion, frustration, and preoccupation. The four senior night shift CSIs were joined by Greg Sanders and Jim Brass. They were trying to sift through the evidence they had collected so far, clear their respective heads, and figure out a game plan for what to do next.

Catherine had insisted that they all eat something. When she had called to check on Lindsey, her sister had asked her if she had eaten a meal recently. Catherine had admitted that it had been a while. If that was true for her, it was probably true for the whole team. Each of them was already fighting fatigue. They shouldn't compound that by neglecting to provide even the most basic of their own needs. Her other suggestion - resting in short shifts - was met with immediate defiance, so she shelved that for now. If this case went on much longer, there would have to be limits set. Catherine just didn't think now was the time to push the matter.

The other issue that pressed on Catherine was the need to update Grissom's mother. She had sent several emails to Mrs. Grissom throughout the day, telling her that they were still working on the case. It wasn't enough, and Catherine knew it. Hopefully, this meeting of the minds would give her a direction to head the team. All Catherine had been able to tell Mrs. Grissom was that Gil was still missing and that they were working on several different leads. It seemed fruitless to tell Mrs. Grissom about Paul Stankowski. Finding him had not brought the team any closer to finding Grissom, so how would telling Gil's mother help her to deal with the ongoing terror of a still-missing son?

Catherine sighed and brought her attention back to the discussion at hand.

"So you got a warrant?" Nick was asking Brass.

"The prints in the Toyota got us the warrant for a DNA sample, no problem." Jim said.

Greg nodded. "It was a clean match, too. The urethral cells were in good enough shape. Your suspect was at that processing plant."

"Yeah," Warrick added, "and Denise was able to match the treads from the casts I took from the parking lot to the Toyota."

"And we know that at some point Grissom was in the back seat of that car," Nick offered.

"But we don't know if Grissom was in the car when Stankowski was at the processing plant," Catherine countered. "We don't have a good timeline for the sequence of events."

Jim was shaking his head. "What I don't get is why our man Paul was even out there? I mean, Goodsprings is pretty far off the beaten path. What was the attraction?"

Nick pointed his fork at the detective. "That's a good point. There must have been some reason for him to go out there." Nick swallowed the last of the food in his mouth before continuing. "We just assumed that his only purpose in coming here was to find Grissom. What if he was here for another reason?"

"Like?" Catherine asked.

Nick shrugged. "To meet someone else?"

Warrick nodded slowly. "Something he was looking for, maybe?"

"Or some place," Sara interjected. Up to now, she hadn't been participating much in the conversation, opting instead to keep reading through Grissom's notes from the Campbell case. She had found these to be extremely detailed and thorough, much more like a seasoned veteran would write than a novice investigator. Early in his career, Grissom had shown all the signs of becoming an extraordinary criminalist.

Glancing up, Sara realized that everyone was looking at her. It occurred to her that she was the one who had been reading the case notes. The rest of the team was depending on her to share any pertinent information. Grissom had been talking to her through his notes but, until now, she hadn't really understood the message. "Listen to this," she said and began to read from the case notes she had been studying. " 'The victim was found to have abrasions of bilateral palms and fingertips. Corresponding clawing blood markings were found on the south and west facing concrete walls.' "

Nick's face showed his confusion. "This is the guy Stankowski was convicted of murdering?"

"Yeah, Chad Campbell," Sara said. "The Sheriff's Department had search and recovery teams out looking for the victim. Grissom was on one of those teams and found Campbell's body in a remote access shaft of the Los Angeles Aqueduct."

"That's right," Brass agreed.

"So how'd he wind up in the access shaft of an aqueduct?" Greg asked curiously.

"According to the police report," Brass informed them, "Chad Campbell was a known dope dealer. Our man Paul was seen trying to make a buy on the night Campbell was reported missing. Apparently, Pauly didn't have enough money for the dope and the situation got heated. They fought. Chad lost. An eyewitness stated that our suspect put the victim in his car and drove off."

"Tire tracks found at the dump site matched the tires on Stankowski's car," Sara continued. "The victim had blood type O positive which was a match to the blood found in the back seat of the suspect's car. Also, type A positive blood was found on the victim's shirt and jacket. Guess what blood type our suspect is?"

"That's easy," Greg responded. "He's A positive."

"Bingo," Jim said.

"Chad Campbell was alive when he was tossed down in that shaft," Sara told them. "But he was dead when they found him four days later."

Catherine put the scenario together. "So Campbell and Stankowski got into a fight over a drug buy gone bad. Campbell was knocked out and Stankowski put him in the back seat of his car. Then he took him to this access shaft and dumped him there, knowing that if and when Campbell woke up he wouldn't be able to get out without help. Campbell did wake up and tried to climb out but couldn't. He died down in the shaft before anyone could find him."

"That's about it," Jim said grimly.

"What was the cause of death?" Nick asked quietly.

"According to the autopsy report," Sara replied, "exposure. He died of severe dehydration and hypothermia."

This last bit of information brought an uneasy hush to the room. Everyone at the table had done the mental math. Grissom had been missing for nearly three full days. And this was the desert….

It was Catherine who finally broke the silence. "What has all this got to do with our case?" she asked softly.

Sara leaned forward. "What if Stankowski came here for revenge?" She paused to look at the faces around the table. "A report filed by the Assistant District Attorney states that Grissom's testimony was pivotal to obtaining a conviction. What if Stankowski was so angry at his conviction that he planned retaliation? What if he went out to Goodsprings to search for a dump site?"

"You mean someplace he knew Grissom wouldn't be able to get out of," Jim theorized.

"Not an access shaft," Warrick stated. "There's nothing like that around there. Another kind of shaft."

"Like an old mineshaft," Catherine offered.

"That's it," Nick said, and as he did it was as if someone had thrown a light switch on. Almost as one everyone came to their feet.

"I'll contact the State Mining Commission and get a list of abandoned mineshafts in southern Nevada," Nick said as he headed out the door.

"Good," Catherine said.

"I'll call the Sheriff," Jim told her. "He'll have Search and Rescue out in five."

"Thanks," Catherine said. She turned to Sara. "We'll need the night scope."

"I'm on it," Sara said. "I'll be on the first chopper out of here. We can begin to sweep known mines even if we don't have the exact location of the shafts. The scope can pick up body heat even if the body is underground."

"Get going," Catherine told Sara unnecessarily. Sara was already moving out of the room.

Turning to Warrick, she said, "I want you and Nick on the first ground units to leave Vegas as soon as Nick gets the maps."

"We're there," Warrick said and headed out to find Nick and make sure there wasn't any delay in getting the maps they all needed.

"What do you want me to do?" Greg asked.

Catherine looked at the eager lab technician. "Pray," she told him.


	23. Chapter 23

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 23/26)

by Cheers

Monday Night 07:09 PM

They finished the second sweep of the Apex Mine, and Sara gave the pilot a thumbs down. Nothing. Next, they would move on to the Sloan Mine and then to the Weiser Quarry. Search and Rescue had set up a strategic search pattern. They were the experts, Sara knew that. What she wanted was an instant find. Her head told her that any moment they could find the man they were searching for. Her heart told her that every second that ticked by was one second too long. Her gut told her that the hourglass sand had nearly run out.

The SAR helicopter banked to the north and sped toward the next search zone. Sara kept her eyes glued to the night scope sensor's display. "Give me something two legged," she whispered. And still breathing, she added silently.

Monday Night 07:11 PM

The map light attached to his clipboard illuminated the precise areas of the desert surrounding the Las Vegas basin that were home to abandoned mining shafts. Some of these had undergone reclamation, but that notation had not been made to the map. Damn, Nick thought. His SAR team had just left such a location. With every fruitless stop they made, precious time was wasted.

The information that he had received from the State Mining Commission was the most accurate he could get, Nick knew that. Companies were continually working with the State Commission to complete reclamation of old mining sites. Not all the clean up and hazard removal work was immediately reported to the Commission. If there were many more sites like this one, Nick thought, we could lose whatever window of opportunity we might have had.

Hang on, Gris, Nick thought. We're coming.

The SAR truck sped away with bright search lights glaring into the desert dusk, headed for the next search target. The receding daylight gave the impression of receding success. Nick fought the urge to shout his frustration as he watched the desert terrain move by.

Monday Night 07:14 PM

Catherine listened to the continuous squawk and chatter of the SAR channel of the police band and watched the pavement rush past as she stared out of the window of her SAR team's truck. They were headed east out of Las Vegas along Highway 160 toward their search targets in Pahrump Valley. Mountain Springs pass was just a few miles ahead. Her ears popped as they rode quickly up the mountainside, lights and sirens pushing commuter traffic to the shoulders as they moved past.

You better still be alive when I find you, Catherine silently told Gil. Her throat felt tight. She clenched her teeth to hold back her rising anger. Whether she was angry at Grissom for letting himself get so caught up in this mess, with herself for not being able to figure out what was happening sooner, or at Stankowski for just being the bastard he was she didn't really know. She was angry, and by God if Gil wasn't alive when she found him, she'd kill him.

Monday Night 07:16 PM

"It's north of here," Warrick told Danny Ellis, the SAR officer driving their team's truck. "I make it about seven miles."

Ellis nodded but didn't take his eyes off the landscape visible through the windshield. The terrain was rugged but nothing the SAR truck couldn't handle. Driving into the setting sun made the going slow. As soon as the sun finished dipping over the horizon, the search lights would make things easier. For now they would have to keep it slow to avoid dumping the truck into an unexpected ravine. The access roads in this area of the desert weren't well maintained and were often washed out by flash flooding during heavy rains.

Warrick wanted to yell at Danny to go faster but knew they were making as much progress as they could while remaining safe. It wouldn't help Grissom at all if their team were close to him but too incapacitated by carelessness to help him. He settled for making sure they stayed on course. He also thought it might be a good idea to resist the urge to jump out of the moving vehicle and try to run ahead.

Monday Night 07:19 PM

He placed a red pin on the map at the coordinates he had received from Nick and another at the coordinates radioed in by Sara. Stepping back, Jim looked at the growing pattern of red pins – the misses. The SAR Commander was keeping track of the misses as well. For the Search and Rescue guys, a miss was another piece of the big puzzle, helping to narrow the focus of a large scale search like this one.

They had hundreds of square miles to search and very little time to do it in successfully. Of course, that was Jim's own definition of success. The search might very well find Grissom after he was dead. For the SAR guys that would be a success of sorts. No one likes to find the lost after their dead, but a recovery is a recovery.

As far as Jim was concerned, nothing short of finding Grissom alive and able to testify against that son of a bitch Stankowski would be good enough. It wouldn't hurt if Grissom were found alive and completely uninjured either.

Yeah, Jim thought darkly, and it wouldn't hurt one damn bit if Santa Claus walked up and gave me that Radio Flyer I asked him for in 1962.

Monday Night 07:25 PM

The lab felt like a tomb. Greg found that the most soothing place for him to be was in Grissom's office. He stood looking at the tarantula and wondering if spiders could recognize the differences in the people who cared for them. Maybe he was anthropomorphizing too much. Maybe he didn't give a damn if he was.

"Think good thoughts, buddy," Greg told the tarantula. "They're gonna find him real soon."

God, Greg prayed silently, let him be just fine when they do.

Monday Night 07:37 PM

The light had almost completely waned. Night was approaching again.

God, he was tired.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Gil knew that the fatigue was overwhelming him. The ever-present thirst had finally faded, and his hands and feet felt numb. He knew that meant that he was in shock. The pain from his wrist and side seemed dull and far away but continued enough to be a constant reminder to his weary mind that this was all happening. His peril, closer now, was very real.

What was it the Buddha had said? "Even death is not to be feared by those who lived wisely." The question he had to ask himself was had he lived wisely? He honestly didn't know.

Dehydration was taking the last of his strength and would soon render him unconscious. The scientist in him wasn't upset by the knowledge. The insects he had learned to love and appreciate through study would return his body to the earth in due course. His mother would grieve. He regretted that. Sons should lose mothers, not the other way around.

What about his other family? Gil had never been prone to maudlin or morose circumspection. He did wonder, though, how his life might have impacted them. Well, he hoped. That was all any man could hope for. Someday they might figure out what had happened to him. Not that it mattered. They would move on. Life would demand that of them.

Horatio's line from Hamlet floated into his thoughts:

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world

How these things came about: so shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual … something …

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,

Something ... something ….

He couldn't remember the rest.

"How does a man choose death as his profession?" he was asked once. "It chose me," he had answered. And so it had.

His prison was completely dark again. God, he was so tired ….


	24. Chapter 24

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 24/26)

by Cheers

Monday Night 08:21 PM

Warrick shined his flashlight down into the shaft. This was the third of the abandoned perlite mineshafts the state had listed as possible hazards in the Goodsprings area. Since this community was very sparsely populated, it had not yet reached the top of the Abandoned Mine Land Hazard Abatement Program list. The danger signs that should have been posted to warn of this mineshaft's presence were nowhere to be found. What amazed Warrick was how hidden this shaft was. The opening was only a few hundred yards from the processing plant they had visited earlier that day, but it had taken nearly fifteen minutes of searching to find the opening in the dark from the details on the topographical map.

Warrick knelt down by the opening and looked over the edge. There was a significant amount of disturbed earth about eight feet below the collar of the shaft on what looked like the end of some kind of ledge. "I've got something," he shouted back over his shoulder.

"GRISSOM!" Warrick shouted down into the shaft. His voice echoed hollowly back up at him. He waited for a few seconds and tried again. "GRISSOM! ARE YOU THERE?"

Alan Rogers, a SAR officer was at his side almost instantly and was shining a search light down into the shaft. The scarred earth was more noticeable in the amplified light.

"See that?" Warrick asked Rogers.

"Yeah," Rogers replied. "Something's been down there recently."

Warrick grabbed the thermal-imaging night vision binoculars from his belt. He panned from the collar of the shaft down toward the end of the ledge eight feet below them. Something much farther down from the ledge was glowing.

"You're right. Something's down there," Warrick said and handed the binoculars to Rogers.

Rogers took a brief look through the binoculars and then reached for his radio. "Not something," Rogers said, getting up quickly and heading back to the rescue squad for his rappelling equipment, "someone!"

Warrick stared after the officer for a moment and then looked back down the mineshaft. "GRISSOM!!" he shouted again.

Rogers was already calling it in as he ran. "Dispatch, three eighty Bravo. We have a possible four eighteen, abandoned mineshaft approximately three miles northeast of railroad track marker six-nine-one outside Goodsprings. Request immediate backup and Air-Evac."

Monday Night 08:33 PM

The entire team had changed their listening frequency to Tac 2, waiting for the information they all wanted to hear. All the communication between Danny Ellis, Alan Rogers, and Warrick could be monitored by anyone with a police scanner tuned to the right frequency. There were a lot of eager ears in southern Nevada listening in.

"Let out the slack," Rogers was yelling. "I'm almost there."

Tac 2 squawked static for a few seconds before Rogers was heard again.

"Okay, I'm there! I've got him. Send down the med-pack."

"Do you need a board?" Ellis asked.

"Affirmative," Rogers replied. "Hold on."

There was several more seconds of static and then Rogers' voice could be heard shouting. "MR. GRISSOM! GRISSOM, CAN YOU HEAR ME?! GRISSOM!"

Somewhere in the air, Sara was holding her breath. Be breathing, she demanded.

Nick had his eyes shut tight. The sound of the SAR truck's engine roared as they raced toward Grissom's location. "Come on," he whispered. "Tell us something good."

Sheriff Mobley sat across the table from Jim Brass in the SAR command center. They looked at each other with the same mixture of hope and dread. This could go either way, and neither man was willing to give in to the hope before they knew for sure there was little else to dread.

"I want them to call me with a name as soon as possible," Catherine was nearly shouting into her cellular phone. "We're on our way back but we're at least an hour from there."

Krista took notes as fast as her hand could write. "I'll get on it immediately," she told Catherine.

"Call me back!" Catherine replied.

Mandy nearly ran over Greg as she rounded the corner and raced into the conference room. She held up her hand in a silent gesture of apology. The room was packed with wall to wall people. Except for the buzz and squawk of the police scanner, it was as silent as a church.

"Why don't they tell us?" Larry asked, annoyed.

He was immediately hushed by half a dozen individuals. Greg had to fight the nearly overwhelming desire to pummel him.

"Is he breathing?" Warrick's voice asked.

There was a click and then Rogers said, "I've got a thready pulse. He's breathing."

"Thank God," Warrick was heard to say.

"Amen," Jim Brass whispered.

"Oh thank God," Sara said, not bothering to worry about the tears of relief that rolled down her cheeks.

"YEAH!" Nick shouted, pumping his fist once and grinning at the two SAR officers with him. They both smiled back.

The conference room erupted into a cacophony of cheers. Greg didn't shout. Instead, he leaned back into the wall behind him and dropped his head. "Thank you, God," he said quietly. "I owe you one."

Mandy threw her arms around him and gave him a jubilant hug.

Conrad Eckley turned to look at the police scanner that sat on the shelf beneath his office fax machine as if it had offended him in some way. He hadn't really hoped that Grissom would be harmed - not really. But it sure the hell would have been nice if he didn't have to compete with Grissom anymore. Would it have been so bad for Grissom to be lost forever, alive and well, but lost?

Catherine turned her face to the window so the two SAR officers with her in the truck wouldn't see her tears. The pressure had been building for so long. Catherine hadn't realized how badly she needed to hear the report that Gil was alive. She didn't just want to hear it, she needed to hear it. Her heart was racing and her chest ached. She desperately wanted a moment to just cry, but like so many other things this past twenty-four hours, it would have to wait. Her cellphone rang almost immediately.

She wiped her face with one hand before answering.

"Willows."

Monday Night 08:46 PM

Warrick paced back and forth beside a state police cruiser. He wanted to be down in that pit with his boss. Grissom was unconscious but breathing. Alan Rogers had gone down into the mineshaft to help him and had been down there almost twenty minutes. He had been joined by two other members of the SAR team when they arrived by chopper. Warrick knew there were important safety procedures to follow to make sure that Grissom and his rescuers got out of the shaft alive. He just didn't like the feeling of helplessness the waiting caused.

Sara stood a few feet away watching the work that was going on at the shaft collar's edge. "He's going to be okay," she said firmly, trying to reassure herself as much as Warrick.

He didn't reply. They listened to the radio traffic coming out of the shaft. Grissom had been placed on a backboard and was being prepared for the trip up out of the shaft. They both heard Rogers say Grissom was in shock.

"Hang on, Gris," Warrick whispered.

Just when Warrick didn't think he could stand the wait another second, he heard the shout. He ran toward the group leaving the opening to the mineshaft. Sara was right behind him. He could just make Grissom out. His unconscious body was cocooned in a rescue litter and this was being loaded onto an air ambulance gurney. The medical flight team had surrounded him immediately.

Warrick and Sara stepped up to the unconscious form of their friend as the medics secured the litter to the gurney. Grissom had a cervical collar on, his left arm was in a splint, an IV was already started in his right arm, and they had placed him on oxygen. His face was covered with dried blood and dirt and he had several days' growth of beard. He was pale. The worst of it was how still he lay in the litter.

Sara reached out and brushed a few stray strands of hair away from his forehead. He felt hot.

"Gris?" Warrick called softly.

A flight nurse placed a hand on Warrick's shoulder. "We've got to get him out of here," he told both CSIs.

Warrick nodded and backed away, gently pulling Sara back with a hand on her arm. The medics wheeled the gurney away. Within a few short minutes the doors of the Air-Evac helicopter were closed and locked and the chopper lifted its wounded cargo into the night sky and sped away.


	25. Chapter 25

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 25/26)

by Cheers

Monday Night 11:02 PM

There was something about being in a hospital. Sara hated how it made her feel. Unhappy things, hard things, scary things went on in hospitals all the time. The worst thing, by far, was how helpless she felt. There was nothing to do but wait. Wait and pray.

He had felt so hot. Sara closed her eyes. For the first time since this case began, she felt tired. The image of her boss floated in her mind. He had been so still – unconscious, his eyes sunken and his skin so pale. The hushed anticipation in the waiting room bore down on her. What was happening? How was he? Sara needed to know. They all did.

The group that waited with her had increased steadily over the past hour. Nick and Warrick took turns pacing around the waiting area. Jim Brass sat with his head back and his eyes closed. No one made the mistake of assuming he was asleep. Greg Sanders kept silent vigil over the emergency department door for any signs of a doctor. The wild card of the lot was Sheriff Mobley. He wandered into and out of the waiting area, keeping tabs on the goings on in the department by phone, while the occasional uniform arrived to give the Sheriff a message. The Sheriff had made sure the doctors knew how important information about Grissom's condition was to the whole department. The team waited with varying degrees of patience. The only member of the team that seemed to be preoccupied with anything other than waiting was Catherine.

Sara watched from up the hall as Catherine spent the last hour playing phone tag with God only knew who and why. Catherine hadn't been sharing with the team and none of them felt like it was their place to ask. Of all of them, Catherine seemed to be taking the situation the hardest. Perhaps it was the extra responsibility that she carried. Perhaps it was something else. Sara didn't know.

Hanging up from yet another mysterious cellphone conversation, Catherine was headed back to the waiting room when a doctor came through the emergency room door.

"Are you all here for Mr. Grissom?" the doctor asked.

The physician was almost immediately surrounded by the waiting throng. Sara and Warrick, Nick and Jim Brass, Greg Sanders who hugged the wall silently, the Sheriff, and Catherine, all approached the doctor. "What can you tell us, doctor," Sheriff Mobley asked.

"We think he's going to be okay," the doctor began. This news was followed by an immediate collective sigh of relief from the group. "But, his condition is still serious."

"How serious?" Catherine wanted to know. Her expression mirrored everyone's. Serious was too elastic a term for her liking.

The doctor, whose identification badge told them that his name was Dr. Harrington, put his hands in his pockets and looked from face to face before addressing himself to Catherine. "We've treated him for severe shock. He is very dehydrated. We are giving him fluids, but if we rehydrate him too rapidly we could cause more problems than we solve. Additionally, we found two broken ribs and compound fractures of his left wrist. He'll need surgery to reduce the wrist when he's more stable. He has a slight concussion and with the dehydration it may be a while before he regains consciousness."

"How long?" Nick asked.

Dr. Harrington met Nick's eyes. "We don't know. We'll be sending him up to ICU soon. We'll continue to give him fluids and monitor him closely tonight. Maybe by morning." He looked back at Catherine and the Sheriff. "Mr. Grissom is a lucky man. He came very close to dying tonight. I understand he had been missing for some time."

Sheriff Mobley nodded and glanced back over his shoulder at the team gathered behind him. "He had a dedicated team looking for him."

The doctor smiled. "I'm pleased for him," he told them all gently. "You saved his life. Dehydration is nothing to take lightly, especially in the desert."

Sara took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She asked what they all wanted to know. "Can we see him?"

Dr. Harrington thought about that for a moment. The patient wasn't going to know they were there, but this visitation wasn't so much for the patient as it was for the spirits of these people. "I think I can arrange that," he told them. "I'll send a nurse out for you as soon as possible."

"Thank you, doctor," Sara said.

There were multiple thanks all around as the doctor moved away.

Sheriff Mobley turned to Catherine and they stepped away from the rest of the group a few paces. "Do you know what our ETA is?" he asked.

Catherine looked at her watch. "An hour or so," she informed him.

Brian nodded. "I'll have everything ready."

"Thanks," she said softly.

The rest of the team present had no idea what Catherine and the Sheriff were talking about. They eyed the duo with a mixture of interest and confusion. Whatever was happening, they were all sure it involved Grissom in some way. Unless and until either Mobley or Catherine was willing to tell the team anything, they would all just have to wait to find out what was up. For now they would content themselves with the chance to see Grissom alive with their own eyes – something that would go a long way toward soothing their hopeful hearts and weary minds.

Monday Night 11:30 PM

The nurse had informed them that they could see Grissom as a group but that he was still not awake. The small group filed quietly through the door and into the trauma bay where Grissom was awaiting his transfer to ICU. The room was large and filled with emergency equipment and supplies. The lights above the gurney where he lay were bright. Some of the dirt that had covered his face had been cleaned away to allow the medical team to assess the extent of his injuries, but he still had some dried blood and dirt in his hair and beard.

His left arm was in a temporary cast and propped up on a pillow, the elevation was to reduce the swelling the nurse informed them all. A heart monitor blipped steadily. His heart rate was rapid and his blood pressure was still a little on the low side. They were told this would improve with the fluids they were giving him through multiple IV lines. He was still on oxygen which would help give his vital organs the support they needed to recover from shock. An empty Foley catheter bag hung at the bottom of the gurney. Despite all the care he had received, Grissom still appeared very pale.

His clothes and other belongings had been removed and placed in a bag. These Warrick took. They were evidence.

Catherine stepped up close to the gurney. She looked at Gil's face. This was the first time she had seen him since last Friday. The difference in her friend was a shock to her even though she had been prepared by the doctor and the report she had received from Warrick and Sara.

Grissom's visitors stayed only a few minutes. He was alive and in good hands. This was all any of them could hope for at the moment.


	26. Chapter 26

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Part 26/26)

by Cheers

Monday Night 11:49 PM

After they had all seen Grissom, the Sheriff had headed back to his office and he had taken Brass with him. Calls had been coming into the department and the hospital from various local news reporters and concerned citizens. The Sheriff would have to deal with the media and citizenry. An assault against a member of law enforcement can frighten a vulnerable public. He would have some damage control to do.

Jim Brass still had to finish dealing with Paul Stankowski and complete the necessary paperwork to hold him until they could file the assault charges. Brass would head home for some much needed rest once his initial report was finished and check back at the hospital in the morning. He wouldn't be able to ask Grissom about the assault until he was conscious. It would help if the detective in charge of the case was coherent as well.

Catherine was all that remained of the CSI team at the hospital. It had taken some arguing, but she had managed to send the rest home without pulling rank on them. She had been prepared to do so if need be. Thankfully it hadn't come to that. They all had agreed to stay at the hospital in shifts. After she had provided multiple promises to notify all of them should Gil's condition change, they had left to shower and rest.

Sara would be back at the hospital in a few short hours, Catherine knew. They all probably would. That was okay. She would have all the time she needed to do what she needed to do. A mother was coming to find her lost child.

Tuesday Early Morning 00:41 AM

Sam Braun stood with his arm around Catherine's shoulder. They waited a few feet inside the doors of the Intensive Care Unit. Just outside Grissom's ICU room, a nurse was speaking to two women. One of these was Gil's mother, the other an ASL interpreter.

"Thanks for everything, Sam" Catherine said softly, not taking her eyes off Mrs. Grissom. "I owe you one."

Sam had been amazing. When Catherine had heard that Mrs. Grissom intended to drive to Las Vegas late at night after being scared half to death all day, she had called Sam. Once she had explained to him what her concern was, Sam had done everything. He had arranged for the LVMPD to send an interpreter from Las Vegas aboard Sam's personal jet to pick up Mrs. Grissom in California. He then had her flown to the Executive Terminal at McCarran and had brought them both to the hospital in his limousine. Brian Mobley had approved the plan and provided the ASL interpreter after Sam had insisted that he be allowed to use all the resources at his disposal.

Sam had also insisted on providing Mrs. Grissom with a suite at the Tangiers for the length of her stay in Vegas, and he had made sure that she wouldn't receive a bill for anything. It was a lot and it meant even more to Catherine. As a mother, this was something that she knew had to be done.

"Don't say another word about it, Mugs," Sam gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "It's not often that I get a chance to do something this right."

They fell silent and watched as Gil's mother stepped into her son's room and stood next to his bed. She gently stroked his face as silent tears fell down her cheeks.

Catherine was trembling, her emotion and the fatigue finally catching up with her. Sam steered her out of the ICU and into the corridor outside the unit. He wrapped his arms around her. Safe in Sam's protective embrace, Catherine let herself cry at last.

Tuesday Morning 09:13 AM

Jim Brass and Catherine stepped through the ICU door and immediately encountered three anxious colleagues. Warrick, Nick, and Sara were waiting for them.

Warrick pointed at the door with his chin. "How's he doing?"

"He's still very weak," Catherine told them.

"Did he ID him?" Nick asked.

"We got a firm nod," Jim confirmed, tapping the folder he was carrying.

Catherine nodded to Warrick. "What did you find out at the lab?"

"Oh," Warrick began, "the Red Wings that Stankowski was wearing when he was arrested were a perfect match to the shoeprints from the stairwell. Greg is trying to see if there's anything usable from Gris's clothes. With the evidence we have now, I think we can put him away even without an ID."

"Excuse me," a woman's voice behind them said.

Turning, the team found that they had been joined by two women: one, an older lady in her late sixties, the other a thirty-something Hispanic. It was the younger of the two women that had addressed them. The elder of the two tapped the younger one on the arm and, after getting her attention, began to sign to her.

Everyone on the team exchanged looks except Catherine. She was paying close attention to the older woman.

After a moment, the Hispanic woman, obviously an ASL interpreter, began to speak to them. "Mrs. Grissom would like to thank all of you for the wonderful work you have done to find her son."

"Mrs. Grissom?" Sara asked, confused. "This is Mrs. Grissom? Grissom's mother?"

The interpreter signed Sara's words for Mrs. Grissom. Gil's mother smiled and began to sign again.

"I'm sorry, I forgot to introduce myself," she said through the interpreter. "It's just that I feel like I know all of you so well. Gil has told me so much about you."

They exchanged surprised looks again.

"There's no need to thank us," Catherine was saying. "We all wanted to find your son. He's not just our boss or a colleague, but a friend."

There was only a brief delay as the interpreter paused from translating and watched Mrs. Grissom's reply. "And that's why I want to thank you. You've all meant so much to Gil that I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate everything you've done for him."

Mrs. Grissom pointed to Sara and nodded to her interpreter before beginning to sign again. "You are Sara. Gil was so pleased that you agreed to move to Las Vegas and work with him here. Thank you for your hard work."

"You're welcome," was all a surprised Sara could think of to say.

Mrs. Grissom turned to Nick. "You must be Nick." She smiled at him. "My son has told me what a fine investigator you've become. He was certain you would do well. I'm very grateful to you for helping to find him."

Nick blushed slightly. "My pleasure, ma'am." His Texas drawl was a bit heavier than usual.

She touched his face briefly and then turned to Warrick.

"And you must be Warrick," she said through the interpreter. "Gil told me about the wonderful time he spent with you on the rollercoaster. He only shares those rides with friends. I'm so thankful to you for all your hard work."

"You're welcome," Warrick said softly.

Turning at last to Jim Brass, Mrs. Grissom touched his arm gently. "You must be Captain Brass. The Sheriff told me you are in charge of the case against Mr. Stankowski," the interpreter was saying. "Gil has had nothing but the highest regard for the work you do. I can't tell you how often he has been thankful for your help. Now I understand why."

Catherine looked at Jim and was certain she saw a hint of moisture in his eyes.

"I'm just glad he's going to be okay, ma'am," Jim told Mrs. Grissom. "We all want to make sure nothing like this happens again."

"Thank you," the interpreter said for Mrs. Grissom.

With that, Gil's mother turned to Catherine. There were tears in her eyes now. She gave Catherine a hug and then stepped back to sign to the interpreter. "You've been so wonderful. I don't know how I'll ever thank you enough."

"You don't have to thank us," Catherine said, not just for herself but for the whole team. "Gil means a lot to all of us."

The rest of the team nodded and voiced their agreement. Grissom would have done no less for any of them. It was the nature of their friendship with a man who was much more than a supervisor or co-worker. Gil was family, pure and simple.

Wednesday Afternoon 12:38 PM

Nick and Warrick spoke infrequently and in hushed tones. It was the unwritten code about visitation in a hospital room, especially when the person being visited was asleep.

They could only visit Grissom two at a time and for fifteen minutes. Those were the rules for visiting someone in ICU. The setting was a bit intimidating, to say the least. The two CSIs didn't want to wake their friend and contented themselves with just being near enough to hear him breathe. The doctor told all of them that he would recover fully. The surgery to set the broken bones in his wrist earlier that morning had been a complete success. They would be moving Grissom out of intensive care that afternoon. He had been extremely lucky that his injuries hadn't been worse. Luck aside, it would be a few weeks before Grissom could be back at work, and that would most likely prove to be the biggest challenge their friend had to face. Nick was saying as much when he heard Grissom's voice.

"Who won?"

Gil's voice was hoarse and his throat hurt with the effort exerted to speak, but he was pleased to know that he could talk at all. Opening his eyes, he found the surprised look he had expected on Warrick's face. Nick wore the same expression.

"Hey, Gris," Nick said tentatively. "You're awake."

Gil smiled weakly at Nick's comment. He must look like hell. People always made statements of the obvious when they didn't want to mention how bad something was. He decided to repeat his question. "Who won?" This time, his voice was a bit stronger.

Warrick and Nick exchanged a confused look. They weren't sure what to say. This was the first time they had been able to talk with Grissom since he had regained consciousness. He had been too weak to talk much before, and they weren't sure he was completely lucid.

"Won?" Warrick asked.

"The Series," Gil said.

This time Nick and Warrick exchanged looks of surprised understanding. Both younger men realized instantly that they had worried for nothing. Of course, Grissom had no way of knowing the outcome of the World Series, and baseball was his favorite sport.

Warrick smiled. "Anaheim in seven," he informed his friend.

Gil gave them a slight smile. "I hope you didn't lose too much, Nicky."

Nick laughed. "Not too much."

"I told him smart money was on Anaheim, but he just wouldn't listen," Warrick chided jokingly.

"That you did," Gil said. This last brought a cough on and with the cough was the pain. His ribs were still very sore. His grimace caused immediate concern from his companions.

The concern in Warrick's voice was edged with fear. "Gris? You okay?"

It took a moment for the pain to subside. All Gil could really manage right away was a weak nod. He was okay. The pain reminded him that he was alive. Not for the first time, he found himself grateful for that.


	27. Epilog

Author's note: I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my beta-reader once again. The success of the story is due to her. Thanks, Allie. You're the best!

This story is based on characters created by Anthony E. Zuiker for the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

Ghost (Epilog)

by Cheers

It had been nearly three weeks since Grissom had been found. His mother had gone home to California three days after he had been released from the hospital. He had called the lab every day for the last two weeks and twice a day for the past few days. Catherine didn't think anyone would be happier to see Grissom get back to work than she would. That was until she saw the look of pure childlike delight on his face when he stepped into his office.

"Is this still my office?" Gil asked, looking to make sure his name was still on the door.

"Why, are you afraid you've lost your job?" Catherine joked, moving around from behind his desk and stepping up to face him.

"Not if I still get to be a part of all the fun," Gil told her.

By the smirk on his face, Catherine knew Gil was feeling much better. She had been concerned that he was coming back to work too soon. She should have known that the best medicine for a man like Grissom was to do what he loved to do. For Gil, that meant getting back to the work at the crime lab.

Catherine visually inspected his face. The bruising had almost completely faded, and there was only the barest hint of darkness about his eyes to suggest how close to death he had come. As a matter of fact, the only overt sign of his brush with the hereafter was the as yet pristine white cast on his left forearm. This would have to remain in place for at least another four weeks, making Gil's contribution to CSI almost purely supervisory for the time being. But being a part of what was happening at the crime lab in any capacity was better than sitting at home another day as far as Grissom was concerned.

"Right," Catherine finally said. Her face took on a serious expression and she sighed deeply before continuing. "Are you sure you're ready to be back at work?"

Gil sobered immediately. "Why? What's happening?"

Catherine hesitated. "I don't want to push too much at you too soon," she said gravely.

"I'm fine," Gil insisted, a bit frustrated with the way everyone wanted to protect him. He wasn't a child. He was perfectly capable of telling them what he could and could not handle. "What's going on, Cath?"

She studied him for the briefest of moments before nodding. "I guess you know what you're doing," she told him, "It's your call. Follow me."

Intrigued, Gil followed her down the hall. They passed the evidence room and rounded the corner of the hallway by the DNA lab. Catherine moved toward the closed door of the conference room and placed a hand on the doorknob, pausing.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" she asked one last time.

"Open it," Gil told her.

Catherine shrugged. "You asked for it," she said, pushing the door open.

"SURPRISE!" everyone in the room shouted.

Gil stood rooted to his spot just outside the doorway to the conference room. The entire night shift seemed to be gathered around the conference room table, which was covered with a tablecloth. In the center of the table was an enormous cake with "Welcome Back, Gris" written in icing across it.

"I hope I'm not late," Doc Robbins said from behind Grissom, making him jump slightly. Turning, Gil saw the laughter in the coroner's eyes.

"You're in on this, too?" Gil asked the ME.

"Wouldn't miss it," Robbins told him. "I even brought my own pen."

Now Grissom was confused. "Pen?"

"For the cast signing," Robbins informed him.

Gil looked back into the conference room and realized that there was a large collection of Sharpie markers on one corner of the table. "I never said anyone could sign my cast," he said weakly.

"Like you get a choice," Sara laughed.

"Come on, Gris," Nick told him. "Everyone's gonna think you're a spoilsport."

Stepping into the room, Grissom looked from one smiling face to the next and realized how glad he was to be there. He found himself smiling, too. "We can't have that, can we?"

"Not if 'we' know what's good for 'us,'" Warrick said.

The cast signing and welcome back party continued for the better part of the evening. Grissom would go home in the morning with a cast covered in glyphs, get well wishes, and signatures from just about everyone at the lab. Jim Brass stopped by to welcome Gil back to the lab and was happy to add his name to the cast as well.

"What are you going to do with it when the cast comes off?" Brass asked Gil.

"I think I'll mount it on the wall next to my Big Mouth Billy Bass," Gil told his friend.

"Well," Jim intoned, "it's good to see you haven't been changed by everything that's happened."

Gil raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"Your taste in office décor hasn't improved at all." Jim said flatly.

Fini


End file.
